“Perdita,” Billy said steadily, his eyes overcast by something dark. “What were you guys arguing about? Why did you tell Father that you wished he was dead? Why can’t you answer these two very simple questions? Everyone still here is a murder suspect.That includes us too.The police are watching, and with the way you’re acting, you’re giving them a reason to think—”
“Think what? That I murdered my own father?” Perdita asked, her eyes burning, the tears that had been teetering on the edge now falling against her milk-white skin.
A heavy silence fell over them all.
Octavius hated the quiet and couldn’t help himself. “Well, the tabloids are always insinuating that he’s not ourrealfather, so who knows, maybe the police think so too—”
“Be quiet, Octavius,” Fola hissed in a voice too low for him to fully comprehend.
“It’s an easy story to believe,” he continued. “Daddy didn’t love me enough because he wasn’t my real father, so I slit his throat.”
Bilal shot Octavius a look that could most definitely kill.
“He was,” Perdita muttered, avoiding their gazes by staring mostly at the ground.
“What was that?” Fola asked.
Perdita paused, clearly weighing in her mind whether to repeat herself. Then something flashed across her face, a look of decisiveness but also a new willingness to surrender.
“He was,” she repeated with more clarity.
Octavius still wasn’t sure what she meant, and it was apparent that his other siblings were lost too.
“What do you mean by that?” Bilal asked.
Perdita wiped her wet face, and finally stared at them all, wincing when she did, as if she were staring directly into the sun. “He was my real father, or biological father, or whatever you want to call it,” she said softly, her words cracking around the edges like it hurt her to say.
Octavius’s eyebrows knitted together, matching the mix of confused and surprised expressions around their malformed circle.
He was my real father.
The revelation lingered in the late afternoon air.
He was my real father.
A knife twisting in his gut.
He was my real father.
The final nail in the coffin of the Button siblings.
4:23P.M.—THE BUTTON MANOR
He was my real father.
Perdita had felt the enormous burden of those words every single day since she’d discovered the truth, but never more so than now.
They were all looking at her with shattered expressions. Fola’s was the worst. Perdita had never seen her sister look so… unguarded.
She had to say something. Her siblings deserved an explanation.
“Just over a year ago, I was working on an art portfolio about origins and I started to become curious about my birth parents. I only knew what Father had told me about them, which was that my biological mother and father were from Vietnam, that they were young students who had moved to study in Prague, where they fell pregnant. Unable to support me financially, they had left me in a local orphanage, where Father then found me. Because of my project, I decided to take a DNA test… but my results were nothing like I thought they would be.” Perdita avoided her siblings’ quiet, thoughtful gazes.
“While my maternal side was as expected, showing East and Southeast Asian ancestry, the paternal side was… peculiar. It was all European. I thought it strange that Father had omitted that part about my history. Or I thought maybe he didn’t know. But then I remembered a phrase he used to tell me growing up. In the strangest voice, he’d tell me that I wasa Button through and through,” she said wistfully. “Other times,” she continued, looking up at the looming Manor in front of them, “he’d tell me that I would be his lasting legacy, which I didn’t think much of either. I assumed he said weird crap likethat to all of us. Anyway, I don’t know what compelled me after I remembered those things, but something in me stirred at this new information about my birth parents, the same something that told me to get DNA from Father… to see what came up. I couldn’t do it alone, and I didn’t want to drag you guys into this, and so Thorin helped me… is still helping me. I’ve known him for several years. He’s my… very good friend.” Her voice faltered. Even now she couldn’t admit to the entirety of their relationship. Not when it felt like her father was still watching, still disapproving, even from beyond the veil. She cleared her throat. “I know you guys don’t trust Thorin because of who his father is, but I know him well and he’s the one who helped me arrange it all in private. I wouldn’t have been able to go through with it all without him. I honestly thought I was probably losing my mind by even considering it in the first place… But something told me that this would be important. And still, I never expected the results. I never expected to learn that there was a 99.9 percent chance of him being my biological father.” Perdita’s voice had started to tremble. Before, it had felt as though something were plugging her words, preventing her from telling her siblings the truth, but now water spilled from the dam, unrelenting, unyielding.
“This revelation led to further revelations over the course of the past year. As you know, I’ve been in the Czech Republic for work… but it wasn’t just for work. I was there to find my birth mother, figure out the truth. How any of this was possible. Thorin helped me secretly track down the orphanage, and that’s where the first threads in the fucked-up cloth that is our lives began to unravel. My birth mother wasn’t a student in Prague like Father had told me, and she didn’t leave me in an orphanage there either. She wasn’t even a student at all. She was a nineteen-year-old refugee from Vietnam who had escaped a harsh life. Father happened to be in Prague on business at the time and decided while he was there that he wanted to expand his prodigy regime to more than just adoption. He’d started this entire experiment to prove that nurture was greater than nature, but it seemed he wanted to explore the very opposite too. He needed tosee the impact that naturedidhave on genius. One experiment wasn’t enough, no. He wanted to see if his genius could be passed down through his own biological offspring. So he put out an ad, which my birth mother saw. She hadn’t yet found her feet in Prague and needed money and shelter. My guess, from all the things I gathered about her, was that she didn’t know what my father’s plans entailed… or maybe she did, but she was vulnerable and desperate. I can’t see a person who wasn’t desperate agreeing to any of this.”
Perdita wiped her eyes angrily. She was going to finish telling this story, even if it killed her. “I returned in secret to New York a few weeks ago, just for a few days. I came by the Manor when I knew Father would be away on business and I told Henry I’d left something important in Father’s office, so he let me in. In Eden, I started looking for evidence, any records he might have kept that would corroborate what I already knew and help me further understand everything I’d found. Eventually, I came across Father’s notes on it all, confirming so much of what I had already suspected. My birth mother had become pregnant via in vitro fertilization and he had kept her in a lab of sorts for the term of the pregnancy, doing experiments on her, controlling when she ate and how much, not allowing her out of his sight at all in order to control the results. As far as I can work out from the medical notes Dr. Benson made during the term of her pregnancy, the tests put such a physical and mental strain on her that she became very ill, and I was delivered early. She passed away during childbirth. Her cause of death isn’t specified anywhere, but from all Father’s entries, it was clear that he was pushing her past her limits. Again, it’s all a guess. I survived, meaning Father had already taken what he needed from her, and the experiment had succeeded in its first stages. The final test would be turning me into a prodigy, which I guess he did. I’ve spent all year trying to piece together who my birth mom was before Father got to her and where she came from, but… I don’t think I’ll ever have the full story.”
