Page 13 of Vicarious

“The children is all.”

Of course, she does. I hope she’s not here to push back on what I said earlier. Because truthfully, it’s a flimsy excuse. If all went according to plan with Revnor, Pray should be under the assumption that my other identities besides Addy Bianchi are neutralized. I run a luxury hair care line that’s about to break into makeup so it wouldn’t be that hard to get Phae the right disguise. A phone call would get the right identifications, create the right internet paper trails to give her a life, and I could bring her right onto Long Island and no one would think she was anything other than a business associate or one of Addy Bianchi’s socialite friends.

Us knowing that Pray knows the twins exist doesn’t really change anything except that we know that he knows they exist, and we’ve hidden them from him this long without knowing that.

No, my reasons for not wanting her to meet my children are very personal.

“I’m not trying to replace you, you know,” she says.

“Replace me from what?”

“You’re the children’s mother, right? You’ve been their mother all this time while I couldn’t be there.”

I sigh.

“Of course, you knew.”

Phae always was entirely too perceptive. It’s easy to miss behind that kind, compassionate smile and her insistence in seeing the good in everything and everyone. But she notices everything. She’s the one who taught me how to pay attention to the little details. How to keep your secrets without lying. Just by skillfully leaving things out and showing your hand when it was time.

She smiles and sits on the bed next to me. “It wasn’t hard to figure out.”

“You’re not… you’re not bothered by that?” I ask.

“Why would I be? If anything, I owe you for it.” Phae pauses and says, “You don’t know how terrifying it was. Not sure if Pray was telling the truth or lying and hoping that even if I couldn’t be there that they weren’t in his grasps all this time. And then to find out they weren’t. And that all this time they had a wonderful mother to protect them. A mother to keep them away from all this madness and the life I spent so much time running away from.”

Fuck. It’s so hard to stay angry at her. I want to be angry at Phae. I want to hate her. For the crime of not being dead and possibly upending her life. But it’s hard to do that when she doesn’t seem to have the same feeling toward me. The woman who coveted everything she had and didn’t hesitate to take it once she was gone.

Despite myself, I find myself smiling some as I say, “I wouldn’t say wonderful… halfway decent at best. Downright awful if you ask Leon and Lady when I’m taking their electronics for getting in trouble.”

“You remembered their names. I didn’t think you were listening when I told you.”

“Why wouldn’t I have been listening to you?”

“Because when I told you…” Phae bites her lip.

“We were running from Viper after we left him for dead when I shot him?”

“How can you say it so casually? Like it doesn’t bother you.”

I shrug. “I’ve had a long time to get over it.”

“How did you? Get over it, that is.”

“What do you mean?”

“I think after me, you may be the one person he hurt the most. And then you almost killed him. How do you put all that aside and… and move forward?”

Constantly fighting, plotting on, one-upping, and threatening to kill each other along with a healthy dosing of wild, angry sex, I want to say. But… that’s not Phae. That’s not how she deals with things. Not to mention, first I need to know or rather, first I want to know, why she wants to know?

Phae somehow sees the question on my face and says, “I just… If I’m going to be helping you and Adrian, I want to make sure there’s nothing festering between us that my uncle may be able to use against us.”

“You’re used to be a much better liar.”

“You used to be much easier to fool.” Then, “I guess I should be talking to Adrian about this and not you. But you’ve been with him all this time. You would… you would know about if… has he moved on. Since… you know. He thought I was dead.”

It takes everything in me not to openly glare at her. To not tell her to back off. That she hasn’t been here and, for once, with her not around to interfere, all paths that Viper could ever take led back to me. That he’s mine and mine alone.

But I’ve always known that’s a lie. I may be his. But he was never mine.

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