Page 215 of Midnights
She nods, satisfied. “Okay, goodnight. You know where to find me.”
I wait until her door clicks shut before letting out a long breath, shutting my own door behind me. The second I do, I collapse onto the bed, still clutching the envelope and all its damning contents and finally let myself feel it.
The frustration, the confusion, the gnawing unease that hasn’t left me since the second I opened that fucking envelope.Let's be real, it's been since I got here.
My gaze drops to the Scotland birth certificate. My name's on it, but below it, where parents should be, is a blank space.
I flip to my U.S. birth certificate. Same name. Same missing parents.
Frustration knots in my stomach, I’m about to toss it aside when my fingers catch something stuck to the back of the U.S. copy.
It's another birth certificate.
This one lists the same details, but with the names of the people I’ve always known as my parents. Relief washes through me for half a second before suspicion kicks in.
What in the actual fuck is going on?
My hands heat as I stare at the papers, my thoughts are spinning too fast to keep up. The edges of my vision blur slightly and the room tilts in a way that makes my stomach hurt.
A whisper brushes the edge of my mind, so soft I almost convince myself I made it up. I jerk my head up, looking around, but shocker, it’s empty. The chill that's crawling up my spine says otherwise.
My eyes drift back to the Scotland certificate, and that’s when I see my birthday.
6/31.
I blink, staring at the date like it’s going to rearrange itself into something logical. Somethingreal.But it doesn’t. There’s no such thing as June 31st.
My chest tightens, as I shuffle through the rest of the papers, each one sparking a different memory, and a different wave of emotions.
My fingers flip through the pages and I skim over something else. There's a copy of my recent run-inwith the law. Heat rushes to my cheeks when I think about Kane or even Cam coming across these.Wish I could’ve been a fly on that wall.
When my eyes land on the papers about Mike, my curiosity gets the better of me. I never would’ve guessed some of this about him. He’s come a long way, turning his life around, building something for himself.
I didn’t expect to feel respect for him.And yet…
I set the papers aside, getting up to turn off the lights. I crawl back into bed, and stare out the window while my thoughts spiral. I try to make sense of everything that I just read, but none of it makes sense. If anything it's more confusing.
This is getting out of hand.
The knot in my chest cinches tight. I try to breathe slower, but my lungs don't want to listen. Then it's back—the tingling, crawling through my fingers and winding up my arms like a lit fuse on the wrong end of a bomb.
This has to be a sign of too much stress. Too much shit piling on at once, and too little sleep.
I don't even notice when the tears start this time. I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to breathe through it, but they just keep coming. I haven’t cried this much in my entire life.And yet here I am, unraveling at every turn.
Everything I thought I knew, everything I believed about myself, feels like it's been built on half-truths and carefully constructed lies. And now that I’ve started pulling at the edges, the whole damn thing is unraveling faster than I can keep up.
I don’t even know what to believe anymore.
The more I try to piece it together, the more untethered I feel. It feels like I'm floating in the middle of a storm with nothing to hold onto. It’s disorienting and no matter how much I tell myself to stop, it doesn’t change anything.
Hopefully, Cam finds something because if he doesn’t I don't know what the hell I’m supposed to do next.
For half a second, I wonder why I'm even doing this. Why I keep yanking threads when I could have just left them alone, let them sit here, neat and undisturbed, never questioning the life I already had.
I could just go home and pretend none of this ever happened.
It’s not like my life was bad before this. It wasfine.
