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He needed to just tell them the whole truth. It was getting too complicated. Every answer seemed to require three more explanations, and he could already feel himself losing track of which pieces they knew and which ones had only been rattling around inside his own head.
“Why not just have Calliope research your father? Liam, right?” Felix asked.
Zane shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess I hoped that if they saw I existed, they’d reach out first? And if they didn’t, I could just move on?”
Saying it out loud made him feel pathetic. Small. Like the kid who used to linger just outside a room hoping somebody would notice him without having to ask to be let in. Confronting his birth father—a father who clearly hadn’t wanted him back then—only to be rejected a second time was more than Zane could’ve handled.
He could survive being invisible to Liam. He wasn’t sure he could survive making himself visible and watching the man deliberately look away.
“And did they?” Avi asked. “Reach out first?”
“Reina did,” Zane said. The answer loosened something inside him, just a fraction. “We’ve only talked online. But she’s not related to my dad. Her mom is my mom’s estranged sister. I didn’t know my mom had a sister anymore than I knew my dad—Irving—had a brother.”
Zane shook his head. It was all so convoluted. His entire childhood had apparently been built on a family tree with half the branches deliberately hacked off.
“So, Reina is Bev’s niece?” Felix asked.
He nodded. “According to her mom—Mayim—the Scotts and the Silvers were neighbors who became inseparable. Same neighborhood, same people, same synagogue. They shared holidays and weekends and summers at the beach…” Zane hated the bitterness in his voice. “Because Bev and Irv were the same age, their parents dreamed of their fairytale wedding from the time they were both in diapers. They were practically an arranged marriage. Mayim and Liam were the odd ones out. Liam was Irv’s younger brother by three years. Mayim was Bev’s older sister by two, so there was no way they would encourage the two of them to date. Reina said the four teens would always hang out together during family time, but it was apparent to anyone with eyes that Bev preferred Liam, though she’d been told in no uncertain terms that she and Liam would never happen.”
“Bev was a messy bitch from day one,” Felix said, the condemnation in his voice soothing something in Zane.
A startled laugh escaped Zane before he could stop it, some of the pressure in his chest releasing with it. Trust Felix to reduce generations of family dysfunction to one sentence.
“I guess the families all remained friends until I arrived, and then everyone parted like the Red Sea, taking sides over what to do about me, two families’ dirty little secret.” His laugh faded. He picked at a loose thread on the sheet, winding it tightly around his fingertip until the skin went white. “Reina said nobody was supposed to know about me but that the gossip mill never stops churning out content. I was the Ghost of Christmas Past that never seemed to stop haunting their happy holidays.”
Nobody spoke for a beat.
It sounded uglier out loud. He’d known it, obviously. Reina had told him as much. But there was something uniquely awful about imagining people passing mashed potatoes and pumpkin pie while discussing his existence in hushed voices. A whole extended family knew about him. They’d known where he was. They’d known what had happened. And somehow, Zane had still grown up believing there was nobody else in the world.
“But you have a half-sister?” Asa asked. “On your father’s side?”
“Yeah, Idina,” Zane said, heart squeezing painfully. Even her name felt strange in his mouth. Too intimate for somebody he’d never spoken to.
“And is your dad…” Avi started but trailed off.
“Alive?” Zane offered with a smile he didn’t feel. “Yeah. He owns a boat dealership, apparently. He’s pretty successful, I guess. It’s weird ‘cause he’s only in his fifties. He’s young. Younger than Thomas, anyway.”
That might have been the strangest part. Liam wasn’t some ancient figure from Zane’s past. He wasn’t dead. He wasn’t lost to time. He woke up every morning somewhere in the same world Zane did. Ate breakfast. Went to work. Had a daughter. Apparently, sold fucking boats.
He had simply lived an entire life that didn’t include Zane.
“How does Reina know so much?”
"She calls herself a professional busybody.”
Felix laughed quietly. “I like her already.”
Zane liked her, too. That was the problem.
“She and Idina are the black sheep of their family,” Zane said. “They were best friends when the families split and they kept in touch secretly, even managing to get into the same prep school. Idina now runs an artisan candle company in the city and Reina is a sculptor who builds massive statues for government buildings. She said their parents couldn’t be less proud.”
He could hear how ridiculous it was that he knew these details. Two weeks ago, Idina hadn’t even existed to him. Now, he knew what she did for a living. He knew where she lived. He knew she apparently hated cilantro and had once broken her wrist falling off a skateboard at sixteen because Reina had sent him a picture of the cast. Little scraps of a stranger’s life that Zane had greedily collected without knowing what he was supposed to do with them.
“You know a lot,” Felix said, sounding impressed. “Are you going to talk to Idina?”
Zane sighed, anxiety filling his stomach like a lead balloon. There it was. The question he’d been carefully stepping around since Reina first mentioned her. “I don’t know.”
“Well, if she and Reina are besties, do you really think Reina will keep her mouth shut?” Asa asked, as to the point as ever.
