“He has no idea. Neither does she.”
I didn’t move.
“I’ve been planning this for years. Getting close to this family was never an accident.”
I froze. My hand found the wall.
She was quiet for a long time, listening.
Then she spoke again, softer.
“He has no idea.”
“I know. I know. But she’s my daughter, and she deserves the truth.”
I clamped my hand over my mouth so hard that I tasted copper.
Daughter? The word hit me like a slap.
I backed down the hallway one silent step at a time, made it to the stairs, and climbed them without breathing. In my bedroom, I sank against the door and stared at nothing.
I tasted copper.
Emily had a daughter.
She’d married my dad, my grieving, wheelchair-bound dad, and moved into our house carrying a secret I couldn’t begin to understand.
I thought of every question she’d asked me. Every careful smile.
“You will not touch him,” I whispered into the dark. “You will not take one more thing from us.”
My hands were still shaking. I didn’t cry.
I made a list instead, in my head, of everything I needed to find out.
“You will not touch him.”
The locked drawer.
The phone calls.
Wherever Emily went on Thursday afternoons when she said she was grading papers at a coffee shop.
I would find out who my stepmother really was. I owed my mom that much. I owed my dad everything.
***
