The downside of modular scheduling was that some days, my classes were scheduled so tightly that I barely even had time for lunch. Today was one of those days. I had exactly one mod—twenty-two minutes—to make it to the refectory, buy food, eat it, and haul myself back to the physics lab, across campus.
While I was waiting in line, I got a text from Libby: a photograph, taken out the window of a plane. The ocean below was a brilliant green-blue. The land in the distance was tree-covered. And coming into view amid those trees was what I recognized as the very top of an architectural marvel. The Basílica de Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles—in Cartago.
I made it to the front of the line and paid. As I sat down to eat, all I could think was that Libby and Nash were landing in Cartago. They would make their way to the house. They would find something. And somehow, the puzzle that Tobias Hawthorne had left first for his daughters—and then for Xander—would start to make sense.
“May I sit?”
I looked up to see Rebecca, and for a moment, I just stared at her. She’d cut her long, dark red hair off at the chin. The ends were uneven, but something about the way it flared out around her face made her look almost otherworldly.
“Sure,” I said. “Knock yourself out.”
Rebecca sat. Without her long hair to hide behind, her eyes looked impossibly large. Her chest rose and fell—a deep breath. “Xander told you,” she said.
“He did,” I replied, and then my sense of empathy got the better of me, because as much of a mind warp as this revelation had been for me, it might have actually been worse for her. “Don’t expect me to start calling you Aunt Rebecca.”
That surprised a laugh out of her. “You sounded like her just then,” she told me after a moment. “Emily.”
That was the exact instant that I realized that if Rebecca was my aunt, then Emily had been, too. I thought about Thea, dressing me up like Emily.
I’d never thought we looked anything alike, but when Grayson had seen me coming down the stairs at the charity gala, he’d looked like he’d seen a ghost.
Do I have some Emily in me?
“Was your dad…,” I started to ask Rebecca, but I wasn’t sure how to phrase my question. “How long have your parents been together?”
“Since high school,” Rebecca said.
“So your dad was Toby’s father?”
Rebecca shook her head. “I don’t know. I’m not even one hundred percent sure my dad knows there was a baby.” She looked down. “My dad loves my mom, that fairy-tale, all-encompassing, even-our-own-kids-will-never-compare kind of love. He took her name when they got married. He let her make all the decisions about Emily’s medical treatment.”
I took that to mean that if Rebecca’s mother had doted on Emily and ignored Rebecca, her father had backed that decision, too.
“I’m sorry,” Rebecca said softly.
“About what?” I asked. As messed up as the Laughlin family secrets were, I wasn’t the one who’d grown up in Toby’s shadow. This had affected Rebecca’s life more than mine.
“I’m sorry about what I did to you,” Rebecca clarified. “About what I didn’t do.”
I thought about the night Drake had tried to kill me. After a disastrous make-out session with Jameson, I’d ended up in a room alone with Rebecca. We’d talked. If she’d told me then what she knew about Drake and Skye, there would have been nothing to forgive.
“I’ve been trying so hard to be okay.” Rebecca wasn’t even looking at me anymore. “But I’m not. That poem Toby left? The William Blake one? I have a copy on my phone, and I keep reading it over and over, and all I can think is that I wish I had read it sooner, because when I was growing up, I buried all my anger. No matter what Emily wanted or what I had to give up for her—I was supposed to be okay with it. I was supposed to smile. And the one time I let myself get mad, she…”
Rebecca couldn’t say it, so I said it for her. “Died.”
“It messed me up, and I messed up, and I’m so, so sorry, Avery.”
“Okay,” I said—and to my surprise, I meant it.
“If it’s any consolation,” Rebecca continued, “I’m angry now, finally—
at so many people.”
I thought back to her fight with Thea on the plane, and then I thought about the absolutely infuriating message Toby had left me.
“I’m angry, too,” I told Rebecca. “And for the record: I like your hair.”
