I’m alone.
And I need a miracle I don’t think is coming.
ChapterForty-Nine
March 15, 1968
Laura knows.
She promised to help me.We’re traveling to Seattle and will stay there with her friend, Dorothy, for awhile.
Everything will be fine.Mom and Dad will never know, she said, and I have to believe her.
ChapterFifty
May 17, 1968
She’s wonderful,beautiful, and ...looks so much like Thomas.Even the red tuft of hair is all his.If only I could tell him.
Mama said his parents are selling the house and moving to the other coast.I don’t want to think the worst, but he might be gone, and the only piece of him that’s left is now my niece.
Mom and Dad will never know the truth and I’m heading to a boarding school in Boston—courtesy of my sister and Edward, who think it’ll be for the best.
Laura let me name the baby, but she’ll have Edward’s last name, not Thomas’s, who’ll never get to hold this beautiful girl.I ...I get to be the fun aunt, but have to follow Laura’s rules or I’ll lose contact with her, forever.
ChapterFifty-One
Mara
“Is there more?”I ask, hoping—ridiculously—that maybe I had an older sister I never knew about.Someone who came before me.Someone who could explain all of this.
No, that wouldn’t make sense, right?It’d have to be like an Irish twin.Nope.That doesn’t work either because no one could’ve been born on the same day as me unless ...
This can’t be happening.
Alec doesn’t answer and doesn’t move because he’s been thinking this all along, hasn’t he?
The way the silence coils between us is enough to send cold, bone-deep fear slicing through my ribs.
I flip to the next page of the journal.There’s a tiny hospital bracelet taped to the page and a reddish lock of hair that’s too pale.The picture that my mother has in her house is there too.Same blanket, same ...me.
My lungs seize.
This can’t be happening.
The words on the page swim.They melt, bleeding into one another like watercolors left out in the rain.My vision pulls sideways—tilting, sliding—until the floor might as well be an escalator heading nowhere.
“I—” My throat closes.The syllable gets stuck like gravel.I try to swallow, but it scrapes, dry and useless.
“Alec?”
He’s already moving, but everything is wrong.The air tilts.The room bends.My body goes from solid to disconnected in seconds—fingers prickling, arms foreign.My hands claw inward, curling against my will.
“I can’t—” My voice barely scrapes out.“I can’t breathe.”
My lungs collapse inward, not like they’re tightening—but like they’re missing.Gone.A hollowed space where something vital used to be.I gasp, but nothing catches.The oxygen doesn’t land.Panic makes my spine buzz, lights flash behind my eyes, and I think—I might be dying.
Then, Alec drops in front of me, his palms warm and framing my face, but I barely register him through the fog curling around the edges of my vision.
