The tension rolled off Fiona in waves. They were almost at her parents’ house, and her unease had only intensified throughout the drive. Callum reached over and took her hand in his.
“Are you okay?”
She took a moment to answer. “I’m just scared I’m going to learn something today that’s going to change everything.”
His fingers tightened. “If you do, we’ll tackle it together. If there’s anything I’ve learned over the years, it’s that it’s better to have more information than less.”
She frowned. “Did you learn that when you were taken by the people behind Project Arma?” Her words were quiet, like she was unsure whether she should be talking about the horrific project.
“When I was first taken, I didn’t know what they wanted. We were put into this big house on a large property, drugged and forced to train. We had no idea what the drugs were until we started feeling the effects of increased strength and speed. I remember being able to hear things I shouldn’t have been able to hear, having no idea what was going on with my body.”
She swallowed. “I’m sorry.”
“When I found out they were turning us into weapons, it was at once a relief and a weight on my shoulders. I was so damn angry that I was being treated as a possession. Turned into a tool for someone else’s war.” He took his eyes off the road to look at her. “Knowing was hard. But it also took the blindfold off and let me see exactly what and who I was fighting.”
She placed her other hand on top of his. “I’m really glad you got out.”
“We were lucky that the team in Marble Falls was able to rescue us. Now we try to use what happened to us to help others.”
“You’re a good man.”
One side of his mouth lifted. “Most of the time.”
“All the time.” He turned right, and her hand tightened on his. “My sister’s car is the red Civic. She’s parked in front of my parents’ house.”
He pulled in behind it, but Fiona didn’t move to take her seat belt off or get out. “If my parents are keeping some big secret from me…I wonder if Amanda knows, and that’s why she’s always hated me.”
“Maybe. But I have a feeling her issue with you is more an issue of her own. The woman likes attention, and her beautiful sister takes that attention away from her.”
Fiona didn’t look convinced, but she smiled. “All right. Let’s do this.”
He kept close to her as they moved up the walk. She took a beat longer than normal to knock, but when she did, the door flew open, and her mother’s mouth spread into a wide smile.
“Hello, my darlings! Come in.”
She gave them both big hugs, and when they stepped inside, her father moved out of the adjacent hall and enveloped Fiona in a hug before shaking his hand.
Amanda’s greeting was more subdued, offering her normal tight smile. “Nice to see you both actually came.”
Fiona’s muscles visibly tensed. “Just like you, I have things to discuss tonight.”
“Well, Freddie was supposed to be here, but he’s away for work and hasn’t been able to get back.”
Away for work? Or away in Ketchum, spending time with a woman he thought was Fiona?
To Fiona’s credit, her features didn’t change at all. “Guess it’s just us then.”
“And me!” Stacey said, as she stepped out from the hall.
Fiona’s smile returned. “You didn’t tell me you were coming.”
The women embraced, and Callum was grateful her cousin was there to take the edge off.
The next half hour was busy, with Fiona and Stacey helping Edna in the kitchen and Callum helping her father start a fire in the fireplace. Amanda spent most of the time on her phone. It wasn’t until they were sitting at the table that he was with Fiona again. He squeezed her knee, and immediately, her hand covered his.
Callum looked at Edna across the table. “This looks and smells amazing.”
The woman beamed at him. “It’s just roast chicken and vegetables.”
Fiona scoffed. “Just? You do the best roast in the Northwest, Mom.”
If possible, the older woman’s smile widened. “The secret’s in the seasoning.”
Throughout the meal, the rest of the family talked while Amanda kept her phone beside her plate. She appeared to be madly texting the entire time. She never looked happy, and every so often, released angry huffs.
Edna touched her arm. “Amanda, dear, please put your phone away. Fiona’s come a long way to have a meal with us.”
Amanda looked up, but not at her mother. She directed a furious glare at Fiona. “Well, she is the golden child, so I guess we should put in some effort, shouldn’t we?”
Everyone tensed, the smiles slipping from their faces.
“Why do you need to do that?” Fiona asked firmly.
“Do what?”
“Put in snide remarks about me whenever you get the chance. We’re having a nice meal, and I’ve been nothing but kind to you.”
Amanda snorted. “Kind? Like secretly seeing Freddie on our wedding night and not telling me?”
Stunned silence thickened the air.
“Who told you that?” Fiona asked.
“He did. He said he was going to get ice when you stopped him in the hall. Tried to kiss him.”
Callum’s muscles tensed. “That’s a lie.”
Her angry eyes slid to him. “Is it? Or are you just dating a woman who can’t keep her hands to herself?”
“Me?” Fiona gasped. “I’m the one who can’t keep my hands to myself? Are you freaking kidding me?”
Amanda swung a nervous glance at their parents but kept her mouth closed. Clearly, the circumstances of Freddie dating Amanda had never made it back to her parents, and the woman didn’t want them to know.
“I do not want him, Amanda, and you need to stop insinuating I do.”
Amanda’s jaw clicked, and she opened her mouth, but before she could get a word out, Mark cleared his throat. “Amanda, stop it. Your mother has prepared a fabulous meal. I think we should enjoy it.”
A beat passed before Fiona wet her lips and turned to her parents. “I actually have a question I’d like to ask you both.”
“Anything, dear,” her mother said, clearly relieved at any change in subject.
When Fiona paused, Callum put a supportive hand on her thigh.
She lowered her fork to the table. “Some strange things have been happening. Because of that, Callum did some digging…and he’s found that there aren’t any hospital records of my birth.”
He heard it straight away. The shift in breathing from Mark. The speeding up of Edna’s pulse, accompanied by the paling of both their faces. He shot a glance at Amanda to see her lips twitching up, almost in a smirk. Stacey just looked confused.
“Why is that?” Fiona asked, when the silence stretched.
Edna and Mark looked at each other, almost like they were silently asking each other what to say.
Fiona touched her father’s hand. “Please. I need to know.”
“You’re not theirs.”
Everyone’s gaze swung toward Amanda. Edna gasped.
“Amanda, don’t,” Mark said firmly.
“What?” she asked with indignation. “She obviously knows something.” Amanda looked back to Fiona. “Your mother was a drug addict friend of Mom’s, who left you at our front door and died a week later.”
Tick, tick, tick.
The ticking of the second hand on the clock was the only sound in the room. It cut through the quiet. The thick cloud of disbelief and shock. The pounding of her heart.
Fiona opened and closed her mouth, not sure what to make of her sister’s words. Were they a lie? A means to get a rise out of her?
Her gaze shifted to her parents, begging them to tell her as much. “Is that true?” Her words were almost a whisper.
She’d never seen her mother so pale or her father look so scared. That’s when she knew. She didn’t need their words to confirm the truth—it was right there on their faces.
Tick, tick, tick.
The clock was too loud. The air too thick. God, she was choking.
She shot to her feet, her chair almost falling backward with the speed of her movement, and without a word, she walked across the room to the back sliding door and yanked it open. Cool air whipped across her face as she stepped onto the deck.
She didn’t suck in a single breath until she hit the railing. She curled her fingers over the edge to keep herself upright.
A lie. Her entire life was a carefully fabricated lie. Her parents…her sister…they weren’t related to her. Even Stacey wasn’t really her cousin. Not by blood. And they all knew. Had Stacey known?
Why hadn’t they told her? Why hadn’t they let her in on the huge secret that was her life?
Little things started to piece together. The way her sister shared her mother’s blue eyes and her father’s dark hair, but she had neither of those things. How Amanda and her parents were short, yet she was tall.
Her chest tightened again, holding in the air. Her birth mother was a drug addict?
The door opened behind her, but she didn’t turn to see who it was, just tightened her fingers around the railing as if that would stop her from falling while the ground beneath her disintegrated.
“Darling…”
Tears welled in her eyes at the sound of her mother’s soft, gentle voice.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she whispered, swinging around to look at the woman who’d raised her.
Her mother’s eyes became watery too. “We meant to. We always planned on telling you. But we just kept making excuses that it was never the right time, and then you grew up and we just…left it. We didn’t want you to feel less like ours.”
“It wasn’t your information to leave. I had a right to know.”
“You did.” A tear fell down her mother’s cheek, and she scrubbed it away. “It was selfish of us. It just got to the point where too much time had passed, and I thought you’d hate us for not telling you sooner.”
She dug her fingers so deeply into her palms that her hands ached. “Tell me how this happened.”
“It took us a long time to conceive Amanda. When she was two, we started trying for a second. We tried for years but couldn’t get pregnant. We were going to give up.” She paused. “Candy Holder…she was an old friend of mine from college. She got herself on a bad track and had issues with drugs. I didn’t even know she was pregnant. I hadn’t seen her for over a year. Then, we just woke up one morning to crying at the front of the house.” Her mother swallowed. “Your father went outside, and there you were, so little and wrapped in a tattered blanket in an old bassinet.”
Her heart turned at the thought of the person who gave her life just leaving her like that. “Did you try to find her?”
“We did. I tried reaching out to mutual friends. Looking into where she used to live. But I never shared with them why I was looking because a part of me knew, if I gave you back to her, you wouldn’t have a good life.” She paused, looking over Fiona’s shoulder, like she was searching for answers. “By the time we’d exhausted all avenues to find her, a couple of weeks had passed, and we’d already fallen in love with you. So we…we found someone who could forge a birth certificate. Fortunately, we were living in California at the time and hadn’t seen either of our families in months, so they didn’t know that I was never pregnant. We moved back home to Idaho and raised you as our own.”
Every word her mother spoke revealed a new layer of a life she’d never known about.
“It was when you were five that we searched for her again,” her mother continued. “That’s when we learned that she’d died a week after she left you with us.”
So many emotions flickered inside her. Grief that her birth mother was gone. Relief that she’d lived a better life than she was born into. “Is that why Amanda hates me?”
Sadness, deep and pained, carved into her mother’s face. “She was five, honey. Old enough to understand a baby had shown up on our doorstep. We pulled her away from her home and forced her to lie to everyone about who you were. I also think she struggled to share us with someone else.”
She nodded. Her sister’s hate ran deep, but maybe it was always just her own selfish belief that she should have been an only child. “Did I have a biological sister?”
Her mother jolted. “No. Not that we ever knew about. It was only you left at our door.”
She studied her mother’s eyes, looking for any signs of deceit. A day ago, she would have thought her mother could never lie to her. Today, that trust was fractured. “There’s someone out there who looks like me. I think they’ve even pretended to be me a couple of times.”
Her mother gasped and covered her mouth. “Candace never had a baby before you, unless…”
Her mother didn’t finish, but she knew they were both thinking the same thing. Unless there was another baby, one who was left with someone else…a twin.
“Really? You’re blaming some sister for your behavior?”
Fiona swung around to see Amanda in the open doorway. “What?”
“Are you going to tell me it was her who’s been coming on to Freddie since I married him?”
She swallowed and stepped closer to Amanda. “I never came on to him. And yes, I think this woman did. Callum saw her making out with Freddie in his hotel room in Ketchum.”
Anger, so dark and ravenous, washed over her sister’s face. “He was making out with you?”
“No. Not me.”
Amanda shook her head and stepped back. “You never deserved this life. It wasn’t yours to have. And now you’re trying to take my husband too, and blaming it on some fictitious sister? You’re a piece of fucking work, Fiona.”
Fiona took a small step forward. She was done with Amanda. Done with her callous words and inability to see past herself. “Actually, Amanda, I was at work at the time Freddie was making out with this woman. There are eyewitnesses of me at work, and Callum saw this woman with Freddie. As I can’t be in two places at once, it couldn’t have been me.”
Amanda’s jaw tightened and she opened her mouth, but Fiona got in first.
“And the only person who stole anyone is you. You slept with my boyfriend, behind my back, while I was still with him.”
Her mother gasped from behind her, but Fiona kept going, the emotion taking root inside her.
“You and Freddie had no respect for me, whatsoever. In fact, you’ve never had any respect for me. You’ve treated me terribly for something I had no control over. And now, I’m done, Amanda.”
Amanda’s jaw dropped, but Fiona didn’t wait around for any words she may come up with in response. She moved into the house and grabbed her bag.
Her dad touched her arm. “Fiona—”
“I just need time, Dad.”
The hurt that crossed his face cut deep into Fiona. But she did need time. To come to terms with everything she’d learned. To accept this new reality.
Stacey pulled her into a hug, then whispered, “I didn’t know. I swear.”
Thank God. She didn’t think she’d be able to handle everyone lying to her.
The second the embrace ended, Callum was there, slipping an arm around her waist, and his strength was everything. She leaned into him, letting him be her support as he led her away from the home she’d grown up in.
