She turned slowly, staring at her dad’s profile. “So are you.”
“We’re going to explain everything in a second. But, Riley, honestly, you can’t just go running off like that. Not you. Not now.”
Riley was sure she felt her heartbeat slow. “Who’s Tim?”
Her father’s eyebrows went up. “Tim? I don’t know any Tim. What are you taking about?”
Riley bit into her bottom lip, relishing the metallic taste of blood that filled her mouth. It was real. She wasn’t sure anything else was.
“Why, Dad?”
“What?”
“Why the secrecy? Why the lies? If I’m really Jane—”
Her father’s glare was sharp. “I want you to forget you ever heard that name, you hear me? Jane O’Leary is gone now.”
Riley turned in her seat, her glare as fierce as her father’s. “I’m right here.”
Her father clapped a palm to his forehead and dragged it over the back of his head. Riley noticed that his hair was thinning, something she hadn’t noticed before.
“Ry, you don’t understand what you’re dealing with. This isn’t a silly teenage thing. You’ve got to believe me. You’ve got to trust us.” He blew out a sigh that Riley swore hitched on a sob. “Please, honey, you’ve got to trust us.”
Something stabbed at Riley’s heart. This was her father. His hair was thinning and there were wrinkles around his eyes—not just when he smiled now, but all the time. She wanted to soften. She wanted all of this to go away so she could crawl in between her parents while they watched a black-and-white movie, eating popcorn while her father did some stupid impression.
But none of that was real.
Riley refused to cry. She spent the rest of the ride staring straight ahead, back ramrod straight, her teeth digging into her lips, begging not to cry.
? ? ?
They were only driving a few blocks, but it seemed to take forever. The asphalt seemed to peel on, inch after inch, going achingly slow. When they finally crested the slope in front of her, Riley suddenly wished the ride were longer.
Her heart started to speed up again, and her stomach folded in on itself. She played with the automatic window button, sliding the window all the way down, gulping in a few breaths of fresh, ocean-tinged air, and sliding the window closed again. They turned the corner onto Riley’s street and ice water shot through her veins.
There was no one else in the neighborhood. Even the other house where a family lived was shut up tight. The sound of car doors slamming—Riley’s and her father’s—echoed against emptiness.
Riley’s throat was dry and she found herself reaching out instinctively, grabbing for her dad. Her fingers found the edge of his sweater and she held it like she did as a small child, her fingertips brushing over his wrist.
“I’m scared, Dad.”
She expected the word “dad” to sound wrong in her mouth—to look wrong on this man. But she felt more attached to him than ever.
He reached back and pulled Riley to him, crushing her in a tight hug.
“What’s going on?” Riley whispered again.
“I’m so sorry, Ry,” he breathed, kissing the top of her head.
TEN
Riley trailed behind her father, walking toward the house like a condemned traitor to a hanging. Halfway there, her father turned around and held his hand out to her. Riley rushed toward him and he pulled her into a hug. She wanted to rewind a week, back to when she was Riley Spencer and no one else, when she would skulk around her bedroom on Saturday nights because her overprotective parents wouldn’t let her go anywhere. But time had passed, and her father had aged, and Riley Spencer had no idea who she was.
Her mother was waiting at the front door, her hands crossed in front of her chest, holding her elbows. Riley wondered if her mother had always been that fragile-looking, always been that fine-boned. Her eyes were red-rimmed but she smiled at Riley anyway—a smile that was half welcoming, half apologetic.
Riley’s heart slammed. Stepping over the threshold into the house—her own house—seemed like an admission of something, a willingness to acknowledge that from that moment on, her life would never be the same.
Both her parents flanked her, ushering her into the room. She settled in the easy chair, her parents settling on either side of her. The birth certificate—Jane Elizabeth O’Leary’s birth certificate—lay on the coffee table in the center of the room, in the center of everyone, but nobody acknowledged it.
“Riley, this birth certificate you found is yours. Your mother and I are your parents. Your real name is Jane Elizabeth O’Leary. Our real names are Seamus and Abigail.”
There was a brief pause; Riley assumed it was to let her absorb what she already knew.
“So why am I Riley? Why are you Glen and Nadine?” Her eyes skidded over the birth certificate. “Why are you just telling me this now?”
“Fourteen years ago—back when you were still Jane, we lived just outside of Granite Cay.”