It all moved too fast, and I couldn’t put the brakes on it without exposing myself as the fraud I was. So I’d been forced to play along, and now I was in California with a family that was somehow buying my bullshit, and when they caught me, I was screwed. I wasn’t sure exactly what laws I’d broken, but the power the Tates had wielded in getting me out of Canada would no doubt be brought to bear in a serious fucking way on the con artist who’d impersonated their missing son.
I ran my fingers back and forth over the fake birthmark on the back of my hand as I considered what to do next. I’d only had the thing for a few days, but already it had become a nervous habit. The birthmark had been mentioned on Daniel’s missing poster, so the night before Patrick and Lex came to Vancouver to see me, I’d given one to myself. Inspired by Tucker’s juvie tattoo, I’d swiped a brown marker and a safety pin from the box of art supplies in the rec room and spent an hour in a bathroom stall pricking the ink into my skin and most of the night holding an ice pack I’d swiped from the first aid kit that hung on the wall in the kitchen against it to curb the redness and swelling. It looked surprisingly convincing if you didn’t look too closely, which so far no one, not even Patrick, had.
I would never pull this off.
I had only one choice, which was to do what I’d always intended. Run. Before the Tates’ emotional high wore off and they realized I was a fake. Sure, now I would be in a strange country where I was out of my element, but at least it was warm here. I didn’t have a penny to my name, and there would be people looking for me, but I’d been through worse.
I returned to Daniel’s bedroom and rummaged through my backpack. I pulled out the baseball card I kept in the hidden pouch inside of it and put it in my pocket. It was the only thing in the bag worth keeping, so I would be ready anytime.
First chance I got, I would go.
? ? ?
I thought about leaving right then but quickly dismissed the idea. I was inside a giant gated community, basically a fancy prison. We were a couple of kilometers from the nearest entrance, and the odds were the Tates would notice I was gone before I could even reach one. My Daniel act had been convincing enough so far; it would hold up for at least a few more hours, maybe days. Part of me wanted to just lock myself in this room until it was late enough to sneak away, but that would seem too suspicious. So I took a deep breath and went in search of the family. Once I reached the foyer, I followed the voices toward the back of the house. By habit, I paused and peered around a corner when I got close, to get an idea what was going on in the room before I entered. I could see a sliver of Patrick leaning against a kitchen counter.
“—have to be patient,” he was saying. “He’s not the way you remember him. His personality is different, and a lot of his memories are gone. He barely even remembers us. The doctor said we shouldn’t push him to remember or to talk about what happened to him until he’s ready. We just need to treat him normally, okay?”
“Why doesn’t he remember us?” Mia’s little voice asked.
“That’s hard to explain, sweetie,” Lex said. “Bad things happened to him while he was gone, and his brain sort of . . . protected him. By hiding his memories away.”
“What happened to Danny?” Mia asked.
There was the scrape of a chair, and then Patrick said, “Mom, wait—”
“I’m not listening to this—”
Jessica turned the corner, moving fast. She slammed into me and recoiled, horror on her face.
She knew. I was suddenly sure.
But she didn’t start to scream or accuse. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m . . . I’m sorry.”
She fled upstairs with Patrick on her heels and Lex on Patrick’s.
“Mom!” Patrick yelled after her. “Mom!”
“I’ve got it,” Lex said, and she followed Jessica up the stairs, taking them two at a time.
Patrick turned to me, his annoyed expression changing into one of concern when he saw my face. I must have looked as ready to bolt as I felt. “Hey, you okay?”
Somewhere above us, a door slammed closed. Back in the kitchen, the phone started to ring.
“I . . .” Shove down the panic. Play the part. “She’s not happy I’m back,” I said, hopefully with enough pathos in my voice to tug at his heartstrings and keep him from noticing I wasn’t his brother.
“No, no,” he said, looking more stricken than I could have hoped for. “It’s not that, Danny. It’s just . . .” The phone was still ringing. Patrick glanced back into the kitchen, where Nicholas and Mia were still sitting. “Nicholas, can you get that, please?” He put a hand on my shoulder and guided me into a sitting room down the hall. He lowered himself onto a sofa that looked like it hadn’t actually been sat on in years, and I sat beside him. “Look, there are things you have to understand about Mom. She’s not the mother you remember. It started with my dad’s suicide, but you were so young, you might not remember.”
I tried not to show my surprise. I didn’t know Lex and Patrick’s father had killed himself. I didn’t even know he was dead.
“They’d been divorced for years, but they were still close, so it hit her hard,” he continued. “Then less than a year later you disappeared, and she just went to pieces. Barely got out of bed for months. Eventually she went to rehab and things got better for a while, but then your dad went to prison and they divorced and things got bad again.”
I nodded along and filed each fact away. Patrick was saving me a lot of research.
“I don’t want to upset you by telling you these things,” he continued, “but I need you to understand why she’s reacting this way. Any kind of change, even something good, is hard for her. And now that you’re back, she’s having to deal with all of her old grief and guilt. It’s overwhelming for her.”
Bad news for Jessica, but good news for me. Maybe she didn’t suspect me after all, and if she did, her instability would work in my favor. It looked like Patrick and Lex were the ones actually in charge in this family, and they both believed me.
“She’ll come around,” Patrick said. “She just needs a little time and some space. We all just need to leave her be until she gets her head around things. Got it?”
“Got it,” I said. That suited me just fine.
Someone cleared their throat. Patrick and I turned to find Nicholas standing in the doorway. Neither of us had heard him approach.
“Who was on the phone?” Patrick asked.
Nicholas’s eyes flicked over to me once and then back to Patrick. Instead of replying he asked, “Is Mom upstairs?”
Patrick nodded. “Lex is talking to her.”
Nicholas snorted. “Great. She’ll never come out.”
Patrick gave him a look.
“I’ll take care of it,” he said, and headed toward the stairs. Over his shoulder, he added, “Mia’s starving, by the way, and there’s nothing in the house.”
? ? ?
Having been replaced by Nicholas, Lex took over dinner and ordered from a local restaurant that delivered an obscene amount of food an hour later. Patrick made a face at her as he handed the delivery driver a couple of crisp hundreds from his billfold, but she just shrugged.