Page 1 of Ugly Truths
Chapter1
One Month After the Explosion
Silas
The afternoon summer sun shines through the windows of my office, its heat casting patterns on the carpeted floor. I sit behind my desk, staring at my phone, where Natalie’s text glares back at me. For four days, I’ve left it there, unanswered.
Natalie: Silas, where are you? I just want to see you and make sure you’re still breathing. Leslie won’t even let me into your office. Call me. Please.
I tap my fingers against the desk.What do I even say to her?
She wants to talk about Scarlett. We haven’t told my sister what little wedoknow about that little snake or the only security footage retrieved from that night at the warehouses; Scarlett surrounded by men with guns, her face almost defiant as she wields a metal rod, smashing open the valve of a hazardous waste truck. Liquid gushes out, and with almost no hesitation, she lights it on fire.
Natalie doesn’t understand that Scarlett is never coming back–at least, on her own terms. And the woman I thought she was? She doesn’t exist.
She never did.
My phone slips from my hand and clatters onto the desk. The rage that permanently lives under my skin simmers, waiting for the smallest excuse to explode. So I force it down, just as I’ve been doing for the pastmonth. If it’s not the seething hatred I have for her, it’s the mounting frustration with my father and his endless delays.
Every day, there’s some new revelation or crucial piece of information leading up to our executive transition that he’s been “meaning to tell me” or “was going to explain later.” The excuses are never-fucking-ending, and I’m at my limit.
I roll my neck and force myself to focus on my laptop, pulling up the financial forecasts and production schedules for the meeting I have to attend in forty-five minutes. The numbers blur together at first, my mind still circling back to that damn footage. Eventually, the metrics and timelines begin to steal my attention, and the endless well of anger starts to ease. Just enough to take a full breath without feeling like my ribs might crack under the weight of it.
The relief isn’t nearly long enough when a knock at the door cuts through my thoughts. I’ve been utilizing the privacy feature on the glass wall that separates my office from the rest of the executive floor more often than not recently, the now-frosted glass making it impossible to see who’s on the other side.
Before I can respond, Davey enters.
“What is it?” I ask, my voice unnecessarily sharp.
Davey doesn’t react to the hostility as he crosses the room, laptop tucked under one arm. “We have an update onher,” he answers.
The emphasis on the last word letting me know exactly who he’s referring to.
I motion for him to sit across from me. He doesn’t. Instead, he walks around to me and places his laptop next to mine before opening it, fingers flying across the keyboard. My hands curl tighter, the violence I’ve been suppressing trying to claw its way to the surface.
“The hair samples from the guest bathroom,” he starts, either oblivious to or ignoring my annoyance. “Our labs extracted enough DNA from the follicles to send to some commercial ancestry testing sites using a fake name. The results came in, and we have matches.”
I don’t say anything. I’m not sure I can.
We’d assumed that Scarlett was an alias since finding her backpack and its contents at the warehouses, which is the reason we brought in experts to search for DNA samples in the guest room. The specialists had said there was a high probability they wouldn’t be able to use them, but I didn’t give a shit what they thought. I was willing to turn over every stone, no matter the price.
All I can manage is a nod for Davey to continue.
“Most are distant relatives–third or fourth cousins. But we did find a match for a maternal aunt. Diane Fetton, originally from Arizona.”
A woman’s face appears on the screen from the ancestry website; her eye and facial shape are unmistakably similar to Scarlett’s.
“Diane has one sister, Lydia Fetton,” Davey continues. “She married a man named Darren Cross when she was eighteen. They had a child a few months later. A daughter.”
His fingers tap a few more keys before the next image comes up. My pulse stutters as I stare at a yearbook photo in front of a standard water-colored dark blue background.Heryearbook photo. The caramel wavy hair, the light brown eyes. She looks younger than her years and a little too slender. Innocent.
“Her name is Elena Cross,” he says quietly.
Elena Cross.
The name doesn’t fit–like it belongs to someone else entirely, but it should feel that way. Scarlett was a lie; a carefully constructed facade meant to lure me. And now that I’m staring at the truth, it still does nothing to smother my anger.
Davey clears his throat almost hesitantly. “Grew up in Kingman, Arizona. Poor town. No siblings. Had average grades but high SAT scores. Went to Arizona State University and graduated with a degree in computer science and a 3.8 GPA.”
