Page 78 of Damaged

God, I really hoped I was wrong.

Chapter 26

SILVER

It was a surreal experience. I couldn’t ever remember a time when I’d felt like I was outside of my own body watching myself doing something, anything. With Ivan, I’d definitely left my mind on plenty of occasions, but the last thing I’d wanted was to see myself as he’d hurt me over and over again.

With Dalton, it was the opposite. Everything with him was so real that I hadn’t wanted to miss any part of it. There were times I retreated into my head when I was with Dalton, but the cause was nearly always related to my time with Ivan. Dalton had never done anything that had made it feel like I was outside looking in. It was happening now, though. Not because of anything Dalton had done, but because my brain cells were being flooded with memory after memory.

Too many to keep track of.

Memories I’d always passed off as images. Now there were even more that I hadn’t known were locked up in my mind.

Hearing my real name fall from my sister’s lips had changed all that. It’d been like someone had snapped their fingers and I was once again an eight-year-old kid doing cartwheels and competing with my sister to see who could fly the highest on the swing set.

It was all just too much.

Yet I didn’t ask Dalton to take me away from any of it. I could hear his voice as he talked to Aggie, but I couldn’t make sense of his words, or hers. All I could process was the sensation of Sadie’s soft fur beneath my fingers as she rested her head in my lap and the sight of giant, colorful fish swimming in and out of my line of sight as I stared at the water just inches from my feet.

Part of me had briefly hated that Dalton had done this. We’d been happy on his boat, just me and him and Sadie.

Or at least, that was what I’d thought.

I’d been so certain that Dalton had been wrong about all of it. That was why I’d refused to listen to anything he’d supposedly discovered about me on the internet. I’d actually felt kind of sorry for him because of the embarrassment he’d face when he went up to complete strangers and told them I was somehow related to them.

He hadn’t been wrong. I’d known that the moment we’d cleared the trees and the house had come into view. All the visions I’d had about cartwheels and people gathered around a long table had been real. The other ones that had started to invade my thoughts but that I hadn’t told Dalton about had been real too. The swings, the horses, the pool.

I’d done cannonballs into that pool.

No wonder I’d known what Sadie had done when I’d been introduced to the fisherman’s shower for the first time was the doggy version of a cannonball.

And Aggie.

The moment she’d said her given name, I’d known it wasn’t quite right. Just like I’d called her Aggie when I hadn’t been able to pronounce Agnes, she’d called me Drew instead of Andrew. Everyone else in the family had always called me Andrew, but Aggie had stuck with Drew for some reason.

“We’re twins,” I blurted out loud when the realization hit me. The conversation between Dalton and Aggie came to an abrupt stop. I couldn’t take my eyes off the pretty fish and the way their big mouths opened every time they approached me. I didn’t remember them at all.

“We’re twins,” I repeated. “That’s why only you called me Drew even when you were old enough to say Andrew. Everyone started calling you Aggie, but only you kept calling me Drew.”

There was a momentary silence before Aggie said, “Mom and Dad wanted people to call me Agnes when I got older but when you kept using Aggie, everyone else but Mom started to. You knew how much I hated being called Agnes. You’d seen how kids had teased me about the name when we were in kindergarten and so you made sure it never happened again.”

Mom and Dad.

I ignored the fact that I had just confirmed who I really was and focused on those three words.

Mom and Dad.

I felt Dalton’s big hand rubbing up and down my back. That meant he was sitting next to me on the wooden bench.

“Mom never let you carry any of the dishes around because you always dropped them,” I murmured.

I heard Aggie laugh. It was a grown woman’s laugh but still held the same mirth behind it.

“Until you ratted me out,” Aggie said. “You told her I was doing it on purpose so I wouldn’t have to set the table or clear it. No putting things in the dishwasher or taking them out. You, on the other hand, never dropped even one. You liked being in the kitchen. Helping Mom cook and bake, doing dishes… it didn’t matter. While I was out climbing trees or trying to ride the goats and sheep around because the horses were too tall for me, you were making pancakes, cookies, roasted chicken. You were always the perfect little angel?—”

Perfect.

As soon as Aggie said the word, I threw up. I managed to turn my head so my puke didn’t land on the pretty fish or Sadie’s body, but once I began heaving, I couldn’t stop.

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