We never should have brought him here.
I could hear her saying that in my head, and I dug my fingers into the grass. I tried to think of anyone else, no matter how far-fetched, that she could have been talking about, but there was no one. I couldn’t explain it away.
It was suddenly so obvious. Pieces that had never quite fit before began sliding into place. All this time I thought they’d been fooling themselves, willfully missing the clues because they wanted to believe so badly, but it was just the opposite. I was the one who had been deluded.
They had instantly accepted me—a stranger with a Canadian accent living thousands of kilometers away who was several years older than their brother—without any kind of proof that I was Danny. They had refused to let my DNA be tested. They had never once questioned the fact that I couldn’t remember my life before my kidnapping and had never pressed me for information about what had happened to me.
I was such an idiot.
I thought back to our first meeting at the Collingwood Police Station, trying to remember the exact look in their eyes when they saw me, the exact words that were said. Lex should have pursued acting the way she’d dreamed, because she was good. The way she’d smiled at me when . . .
“Oh my God,” I whispered as another piece slotted into place.
That time we spent alone together, when Lex and Patrick showed me pictures of the family on her phone—they hadn’t been trying to bond with me or reassure me about my loving family waiting at home. They were prepping me for the test they knew the immigration official Patrick had contacted would give me. They were making sure I would pass.
Then there was the way Lex had watched me so closely in my first weeks here. Not because she was worried about me, but because I was a stranger she couldn’t trust. Lex telling Mia to lock her door at night. Patrick not blinking when he discovered me studying video of the real Danny and coaching me on how to get through my FBI interview without sounding rehearsed. The signs kept piling up in my head.
My stomach roiled, and I lay back in the grass, the dew cool through my thin T-shirt. Every outburst or whispered conversation I had overlooked or explained away suddenly made sense. And every affectionate look and touch and encouraging word had been a lie.
Who else knew what I really was? Mia couldn’t, and I held tightly to that fact, one little piece of stillness in a world that was suddenly spinning around me. She was too young for such a complex deception or to recognize that I wasn’t the brother she’d never really known.
Nicholas had been openly suspicious of and even hostile toward me, which was harder to parse. Was he angry because he knew I wasn’t his brother, or because he suspected I wasn’t even when everyone else told him I was?
I had fewer doubts about Jessica. She had to know. I’d always doubted a mother would mistake a stranger for her own child, but I had assumed her alcoholism and disconnection from the family kept her from seeing through my deception. But now that disconnection seemed less selfish—and, frankly, convenient for me—and more sinister. Maybe she wasn’t just a self-involved alcoholic who never should have had children. Maybe she had a very big secret to hide, and the only way she could do it was to hide herself. If I hadn’t been so determined to believe I’d found a home here, I would have realized what was really going on the night she crashed her car and started screaming that I wasn’t her son. But I’d wanted to believe so badly that I’d swallowed every half-baked excuse I’d been given.
This family, this home that I thought was becoming mine, it was all lies. Nothing here had ever been real.
I’d never felt as alone as I did in that moment. Not when I was a little boy hiding in the back of a closet from the raging monster outside or when I was hungry and cold and spending the night walking empty streets so I wouldn’t freeze. It was one thing not to be loved, but it was another thing entirely to believe that people loved you and then learn all at once that they didn’t. It crushed the air from my lungs.
I lay there, struggling to breathe, for a long time. I searched all of my memories, looking for more clues I had missed and any hint that there’d been something real. Goose bumps rose on my skin, but I didn’t sit up, didn’t try to warm myself.
I was dimly aware of a thought trying to make its way through all the noise in my head, like a snake through tall grass. It had a long way to travel, but eventually it reached me.
Why?
The question was soft at first, but persistent.
Why?
Why would they lie? Why would they accept a boy they knew to be an impostor into their home and family? Why play such a risky game?
Because they had to, Patrick had said.
There was only one reason, and I tried to push it away. To focus only on my own tragedy, my own anger that they’d played me at the game I’d thought I invented, the death of my own hopes. But I couldn’t escape it. My skin had been covered in goose bumps from the cold only moments ago, but now it flushed hot, my forehead prickling with sweat, the heat building in my gut until I rolled over and vomited bile from my empty stomach onto the neighbor’s lush lawn.
There was only one reason the Tates would let me pretend to be Danny when they knew I wasn’t. Only one reason they would have to.
Because my presence hid their crime.
Because one of them had killed him.
? ? ?
Fuck this. Fuck them and all of this. I was gone.
I stood up on wobbly legs and headed in the direction I thought the house was. I would’ve taken off right then except I didn’t have any shoes. I had to go back into the Tate house one last time, but then I would disappear for good.
It took me fifteen minutes to figure out where I was and make my way back. Patrick’s car was still in the driveway, and the lights were off in all the windows, so he must have been spending the night. I slipped in through the front door and then stood in the foyer, listening for sounds of movement anywhere, but the house was silent and still. I took the stairs up to the second floor two at a time. I opened the door to my bedroom—Danny’s bedroom—and saw it fresh. This was a dead boy’s room. I had always known Danny was probably dead, but I suddenly felt it. The chill wasn’t just from the air-conditioning. Danny Tate—the boy who’d stuck those stars to the ceiling, who had loved baseball and the color blue—was dead, and one of the people under this roof had killed him.