The quiet girl from Arizona.
The girl with long dark hair, sharp eyes, and no Instagram history for anyone to stalk. The girl who didn’t know which families owned which galleries, ranches, restaurants, and dirty politicians. The girl who didn’t care that Brielle’s father built half the luxury homes outside town or that Addison’s mother sat on every charity board in Santa Fe.
At first, they respected me because they couldn’t place me.
Then someone did.
I still didn’t know who started digging. Maybe it was one of the boys after I turned down a date. Maybe it was one of the girls because my face made them nervous. Maybe it was a bored rich kid with newspaper archives, too much free time, and a cruel streak dressed up as curiosity.
Whoever it was, they found everything.
Old engagement announcement.
The resemblance between Mandy, Tarak’s wife, Amber, and me… well we could’ve been triplets. If we had been born in the same decades.
The old photos cut me more than I’d ever admit. I hid my pain and shame that the past still had so much power to torment the ones who loved me in the present. I refused to tell Tarak, Edge, Amber and Regan. These people that were now mine deserved protection and peace.
But the anonymously posted pics were like looking through a glass through time:
Tarak and Mandy, smiling like tragedy hadn’t already bought a ticket and taken a front-row seat.
A grainy photo from some clubhouse charity ride before everything went wrong, Mandy laughing on the back of a bike, hair flying, one hand on Edge’s shoulder even though she was supposed to belong to another man.
The car crash article.
The funeral notice.
A blurred newspaper photo of men in leather standing at the cemetery, Edge half-turned from the camera, face carved out of stone.
Then came the comments.
The whispers.
The screenshots passed around between classes.
Isn’t that your mom?
Wasn’t she engaged to that Tarak guy?
Wait, but Edge Rourke was at her funeral too?
So who’s your real dad?
Did your mom even know?
By Christmas, I wasn’t the mysterious girl from Arizona anymore.
I was Mandy’s daughter.
The club whore’s kid.
And Destiny was my real first name not the middle one Regan had put down on the admissions paperwork. I shrugged and said the “helper” filled out the paperwork and was dyslexic. Destiny suited me just fine.
The dead woman’s mistake.
Santa Fe had finally found a box to shove me in, and once it did, nobody cared if I suffocated.
Brielle stepped closer now, her smile all glossy poison. “What do bikers tip, anyway? Ones? Fives? Or do they pay in meth and bad tattoos?”
