Ignite (35 page)

“I have to go,” I said. “I’m going to read this at home.”

He walked over and hugged me quickly.

“Do you want me to walk you home?”

I shook my head.

“I’ll be fine. I’ll text you later. I just need some time to figure all of this out.”

“Okay,” he said, kissing me on the forehead. “I love you.”

“I love you too,” I whispered as I pulled away. I hoped it wouldn’t be the last time we said that, but the feeling in the pit of my stomach scared me.

He stood in the doorway and watched me leave. There was a look on his face that I couldn’t quite place, somewhere between pain and anxiety.

I couldn’t help but wonder what he was holding back from me, and why. I turned the letter over in my hands as I walked home. The answers might be right here, but I couldn’t bring myself to open it. I wasn’t ready to know the truth.

THE NEXT MORNING, Callie seemed off. She was still home when I left to drive Chase to school.

“Callie, are you okay?”

She nodded. “I’m fine.”

I could tell she was actually crying out for help. I had told enough people I was
fine
to understand that, but I didn’t want to push it with her.

“I’ll see you after school. Have a good day.”

She nodded and grabbed her bagel off the counter.

Emma slept most of the morning until I got a call from Callie.

“Can I come home? I’m feeling sick.”

“What’s wrong?” I asked, even more concerned than I was earlier. “Is it that girl again?”

“No,” she said, sounding muffled against the receiver. “I just need to come home. Can you call me out, please?”

I didn’t want her to think this would be something that happened all the time, but the sound of her voice scared me.

“Sure,” I said. “I’ll see you soon.”

“Thanks,” she breathed, sounding relieved.

Principal Langston was less than thrilled when I called, but I was persuasive enough that she said she would allow Callie to take a half day so long as she made up the classwork she missed.

I sat on the stairway, waiting for Callie’s car to pull up. When she came inside, her hood was pulled up over her head and she slammed her bag down in the hallway. When she saw me, she froze. I could tell she had been crying.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

She shook her head.

“If you change your mind, I’m here.”

She nodded and muttered her thanks and ran past me to her room.

A few hours later, I went to pick up Chase. While and he and Emma were playing one of his favorite board games, I decided to go check on Callie, who hadn’t emerged from her room since she came home earlier.

I knocked tentatively on the door.

“Hey, Callie. Can I come in?”

“Sure,” she called, her voice muffled.

I opened the door slowly and found her face down on her bed.

“Hey,” I said, trying to make my voice sound as soothing as possible. “What’s going on?”

She burst out into tears.

“I can’t do it without her, Lauren. I can’t. I miss her so much.”

I knew she was talking about her mom. I knew because I felt the same way about my dad.

“Come here,” I said, pulling her towards me. I hugged her tightly and stroked her hair as she cried into my shoulder.

“It’s just not fair,” she said. “I want her back.”

“I know sweetie, I know.”

She cried for a few minutes and then seemed to calm down.

“Can I tell you something?” She said, pulling away as she sniffled.

“Anything.”

“I found her.”

My heart fell.

“What?” I gasped.

She swallowed and looked at me seriously. I knew another wave of tears was about to come.

“I
found
her. It was the worst day of my life. I came home from school and kept calling her and she wouldn’t respond. So I went into her room and that’s where she was. I had to call the police and go and get Chase and Emma, it was so awful Lauren. I’ll never be able to wipe that day from my memory.”

I started to cry with her just thinking about it.

“Oh Callie,” I said, hugging her once more. “You’re so brave. That is probably the hardest thing you’ll ever have to go through in your life. I can’t even imagine.”

We sat there for a long time, her sniffling and me trying not to cry harder than she was.

“Can you help me?” she asked finally. “I can’t do it by myself.”

“Do what?”

“I need to clean out her room. We’ve just left it there, I haven’t touched anything since the day she died. It can’t say that way. She would want us to clean it out.”

I swallowed nervously, but I tried to look strong for Callie.

“Okay, we can do that,” I told her as calmly as I could.

I didn’t really know if I could even muster the courage to help Callie clean Linda’s bedroom− the room that she had shared with my father before he died, but I couldn’t leave her alone in this.

“If you want, you can even move upstairs,” Callie suggested. “You can live in their room.”

I shook my head.

“I don’t know if any of us are ready for that yet.”

I wanted to tell her that I could never sleep in that room, but didn’t want to go into detail why.

“Can we just go in there?” Callie asked. “I just need to.”

“Sure,” I said, trying to be as brave as she was.

She got off the bed and I followed her down the hallway to the master bedroom. Taking a deep breath, she pulled on one knob of the double doors and pulled it open.

She let out a sigh and walked in.

I just stood outside of the doors, not wanting to budge.

“Lauren, are you coming?” she asked, turning on the lights.

I shook myself out of my reverie.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m coming,” I said, bracing myself. If Callie could be brave, so could I.

It was a beautiful room with high ceilings, a huge bed, and an on suite bathroom with a jacuzzi tub. There were picture frames absolutely everywhere. There were pictures of Chase playing baseball, of Emma sitting on a swing set, and of Callie getting ready for school dances. One picture in particular caught my eye. There were two dressers next to the bed, one on each side. One was clearly Linda’s, and the other held only a Bible and a picture of a little girl with long red hair standing in front of a boat. I touched it and dust came off on my fingers. I brushed it more so I could see the image more clearly. The boat behind the little girl read
Annabelle,
and this picture looked oddly familiar. Where had I seen it before?

My breath caught and I studied the little girl more closely.

No.

Why would Linda let a picture of me stay there? She always hated me.

I turned to see Callie running her hands over her mother’s vanity. She was sampling the perfume bottles kept there, no doubt remembering what her mom had worn on certain occasions.

I felt a sudden pang of jealousy. Although I had a mom and Callie didn’t, mine didn’t want me. She talked to Tucker, not me. She never once checked in on me when I was hurt, or wanted to wish me a happy New Year’s. My mom didn’t care.

There was an enormous dresser that I remembered my dad had when I was little. There were carvings of bears catching fish in a river on the top. I opened it slowly and saw that everything was still left inside. Much like Callie left her mom’s belongings, Linda had left my dad’s. All of his shirts still hung ironed and in their places, as though he was going to step out of the shower and put one on at any moment. Not only that, but they smelled like him. My eyes welled up remembering how he smelled when I hugged him, and how he returned covered in soot from the mine.

I pulled open the watch drawer. Inside were all of his most beloved trinkets, from his father’s watch to his fraternity pledge pin. There was a stack of pictures on one side, and I pulled them out to look at. They were all of me when I was little. Me coming down a slide on a playground, me fishing, me sitting on a rock by a river. When I got to the bottom picture, my heart flopped yet again. It wasn’t of me. It was of my father and a teenage boy who looked about sixteen. The boy had cuts all over his face and one of his eyes was blackened. He was smiling, but he was scared. He looked so familiar but I couldn’t place him. I put the pictures back, wondering who the boy was. It obviously wasn’t Tucker, because his hair was too dark. I pulled the picture out of the stack and tucked it into my pocket.

Callie had started going through Linda’s lipsticks when I moved on to another drawer.

There were a ton of different documents that I recognized. He always kept copies of things. His birth certificate, Tucker’s birth certificate, our social security card numbers, my birth certificate, and then another shock to the system. This was enough to send me to my knees.

“Lauren, what is it?” Callie saw me holding the piece of paper in my hand as I dropped to the ground staring at it. She rushed to my side.

“Callie,” I asked shakily. “What is your last name?”

I knew very well that it was Barlow.

“Barlow,” she said quickly. “Why?”

“What’s Chase’s last name?”

“Barlow,” she said. “I don’t get…oh.”

She trailed off when she saw what I had in my hand.

“What’s Emma’s last name?” I whispered, shaking.

Callie sighed.

“Lindsay.”

Tears fell from my eyes.

“You didn’t know,” she said softly, placing a hand on my shoulder.

I shook my head and sat there crying. Callie pulled the birth certificate out of my hand so I wouldn’t get tears on it.

A few minutes later, I took it back.

Emmeline Rose Lindsay.

“Is Emma my sister?”

Callie nodded. “She’s
our
sister.”

“I thought Dean had told you,” Callie said softly.

I felt like I was going to throw up.

Dean?

“Wait,” I said, turning to Callie. “Why would Dean know about this?”

She shrugged.

“I don’t know, because Dean was closer to your dad than anyone.”

My heart stopped, and then broke in half. This should have been welcome news, but he didn’t say anything. He’d just let me fall in love with him, and he didn’t say a word. I wasn’t sure what this meant for us, but it was monumental.

I stood up and shoved Emma’s birth certificate at Callie.

“Was this some kind of joke that everyone was in on but me?”

Callie shook her head.

“No! Of course not! I hated you at the beginning, remember?”

I did. All too well.

“But no one said anything! Not you, not Jed, not Kenzie, not
Dean
!”

“I thought you knew!” Callie exclaimed, following me down the stairway.

“No,” I said, turning to her. “I had no idea. And now I feel like everything I’ve experienced while I’ve been here is a complete and total lie. You don’t just
do
that to someone.”

She put her hand on my shoulder.

“I’m sure he just didn’t know how to tell you,” she said in his defense.

I scoffed.

“Oh right. I’m sure he did this on purpose, like it was some kind of game to him.”

“Lauren, I don’t think it’s like that at all,” Callie said. “I think he really does love you.”

I wanted to scream.

“I can’t do this,” I said, collapsing on the bottom stair as the tears came again. I had never felt so betrayed in my life. “I can’t do this.”