She trudged up the stairs, her heart a stomach-dropping thud each time her foot fell. She didn’t want to be in her room. She didn’t want to be locked into a box where someone—somehow—had photographed her.
Riley swallowed at the lump in her throat as she reached out to turn the doorknob. She flung open her bedroom door and finally let out the breath she didn’t know she was holding. She scanned the room with wide eyes before tiptoeing across the carpet and snatching up her laptop. Her parents had commanded her to her room—she was willing to compromise. Riley slid down in the doorway and pulled her computer onto her lap.
She went back to her screen and blinked at the message now displayed.
“‘Internet connection lost’? What the hell?”
She typed in her password, groaning when nothing happened. She typed in the WEP key and the server password. The computer dinged and red letters lined the screen: SMILYRILY NO LONGER HAS ACCESS TO THIS ACCOUNT.
? ? ?
Riley’s eyes were bloodshot and raw the following morning. She had spent the night turning, considering: the open front door that she knew she had locked. The postcard, the photograph—Tim. She shuddered. Something about him—about the way he said her name, the way he looked down at her and said she was Jane—it struck something cold and dark way down in Riley’s belly. Not fear, exactly.
Something much, much worse.
She thought of the hard look in her father’s eyes as he yanked her into the house.
Did her parents know that she had met Tim?
“Stop it, Ry,” she muttered.
“They’re going to try to isolate you…”
The severe red letters barring Riley from her email account flashed in her mind.
She had had her phone and Internet taken once before, but that was after she failed a midterm—not after an impromptu trip to the mall.
I KNOW WHO YOU ARE…
Was the note from Tim?
The thought stabbed at her heart, and guilt washed over her. Would she really believe a stranger, someone who approached her in a mall, more than she believed her own parents?
Her eyes instantly went to her laptop and the folded-up birth certificate hidden underneath. She wanted to snatch it up and tear it into a thousand tiny pieces. If she could tear it small enough, make it disappear, then maybe everything would go back to normal and she wouldn’t be Jane Elizabeth O’Leary.
“I’m not her,” Riley said defiantly, as if somehow Tim could hear her. “I’m not Jane O’Leary.”
Even with her admission, she knew that she was beyond the ability to stamp out errant thoughts about Jane. Even when she focused on the hot water pouring over her head in the shower, Jane was there, whispering, wondering about Riley.
No baby pictures…the nightmares…
Riley had been plagued with nightmares for as long as she could remember. They were always the same. They always chilled her to her very core, leaving her skittish and cold for hours after she woke.
Maybe I’m remembering something…maybe it was the night Jane—I?—went missing…
She turned off the shower and dressed, not bothering to flick on the radio like she usually did. She didn’t even dry her hair, opting instead to weave the wet strands into some semblance of a bun. She picked her way down the stairs as if she were a stranger in her own house, averting her eyes at the memory wall her mother had finished—pictures of Riley and her parents at a park, at Disneyland, a three-year-old Riley hugging Mickey Mouse, her eyes the size of saucers.
Nothing before three years old, that same suspicious voice in her head breathed. Because Riley Alan Spencer didn’t exist before that?
She shook off the thought and walked into the kitchen where her father glanced up at her over the edge of his newspaper. Her mother was scrubbing something more intently than she needed to, and Riley pulled a chair from the table, sitting down silently. Her mother had left her a bowl and a spoon, her pill and her juice, and now she turned, setting the “end of” cereal container in front of Riley. It was Riley’s favorite—a big plastic container that contained all the leftovers of cereal boxes when there wasn’t enough for a respectable bowl. Everything got shoved in there willy-nilly, and Riley loved the surprise, loved the taste of sweet-crunchy-healthy-marshmallow packed into every bite.
But now it made her stomach roil.
Her mother sat down wordlessly and poked a knife into a grapefruit half while Riley chewed her cereal, biting down until it was paste, her jaws aching after four bites. She glanced at her father, who snapped his newspaper and turned the page. She could see her mother in her peripheral sight, hear the sound of the serrated knife sawing through grapefruit flesh. She could hear the pulse of her own heart, throbbing in her ears. Everyone was so deathly silent, but the silence was so deafeningly loud. Riley reached into her pocket and fingered the edge of the birth certificate. On a whim, she had pulled it from under her laptop and stashed it there. She set her spoon down.