Page 27 of Twisted Legacy

I walk my usual route on autopilot. It’s not until I’m standing outside of the hotel that I realize what I’ve done. This was a mistake. I shouldn’t have come to this part of the beach. I’m trying to escape my moody thoughts, but I’ve walked straight into a reminder that I’m surrounded by liars. How did I not see I was being played?

Looking up at the hotel, my heart breaks a little more. Van told me this was a safe place, somewhere I could always come, and that’s a lie too. She’s Scott’s mother. She had to have known all this time. I walk towards the side of the building and see her sitting on the patio, staring off into the water, just like I’ve often done. It’s so tragically funny now to think about how similar we are in that regard.

She turns to face me, and my last shred of hope that she didn’t know evaporates. “You should have told me.”

“It wasn’t my place.”

“You let me come here and work for you, and talk to you and trust you, and none of it was true.”

“What part wasn’t true?”

“How much you... How much you cared about me, and my dreams and my goals. It wasn’t true.”

“Thea, it wasalltrue. I do care about those things, and about you.”

I shake my head, my hand clenched at my side.

“Would you have opened up to me, if you knew? Would you have felt free to talk to me if that truth was hanging between us? Or would you have hated me the way you think you do right now?”

“How could you let them throw me away?! How could they just throw me away?”

She shoves to her feet and moves toward me. I see the look in her eyes. A mixture of resignation and hope. “Let’s get something straight, young lady.Nobodythrew you away. They were trying to protect you. We were all trying to protect you. I’ll give you a little truth, since I already know Scott and Moira haven’t. Until they found you, your parents thought you were dead.”

“If that’s the case, then why did they keep looking for me, or was that part a lie, too?”

“They weren’t lying. They kept looking, because sometimes logic and the deepest hopes of your heart don’t always add up. Logic said you couldn’t have survived the car accident when you were four. Their hearts said no bodies were recovered at the scene, so keep looking. I saw the photos of the accident site. Logic said you and Hailee burned to a crisp, because after that, there were no digital records of either of you anywhere. There was nothing but ash, nothing they could use to identify who was in the car that was registered to Hailee. None of us had any hope. But emotionally Scott and Moira weren’t going to stop until they had proof.”

“And it only took them roughly twenty years to get it. Oh wait, that’s a lie too, since I’m repeating my eighteenth year on earth.”

That shit burns, too. How the fuck am I only eighteen? I know it’s a trend to lie about your age, and hang onto your youth for as long as possible, but I don’t want to be younger than I am.

“So tell me, Van, what took you all so long to find a detective with any fucking sense?”

She snorts and rolls her eyes. “Scott and Moira didn’t want to raise suspicion about what they were doing, and you’re right. A lot of the investigators they hired weren’t worth the toilet paper I use to wipe my ass. The only reason the last one got a decent lead was because of you.”

“Me?”

“Yes, you. Louisiana is the last place we knew you lived, so that’s where they were looking. The state systems don’t talk to each other about immunization or school records. Even if we would have known you were in Nevada sooner, they wouldn’t have found you. Somehow Hailee doctored your birth certificate, making you a year older, and you lived in damn near every city and town in Nevada. But one day, you finally stopped running.”

“I wasn’t running, I-”

A memory comes to me. One I hadn’t thought about for a long time. One I’ve always dismissed as a remnant of a dream.

Thea. We have to go.

But why, mama? I like it here.

Because we’ve been here too long already. We have to keep moving. Always keep moving.

No mama. I wanna stay.

If we stay, they’ll find you, and I can’t ever let them find you.

She loads me into the car and asks me to sing our favorite song. I do, at the top of my lungs, loving when she joins in. We travel a long time, then mama finally tells me we’re here. I don’t know where, but I smile as I look at the cabin in front of us.

Is this our new house?

No baby, this is our playhouse. We’re gonna play a game. You remember I taught you how to be invisible?

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