“Can you identify the people you just named for me, Daniel?”
I started to leaf through the photos. “Here’s Nicholas,” I said, pulling out what looked like a school portrait and sliding the picture toward her. I flipped past a couple of pictures of people I didn’t recognize, looking for Mia or my parents, when my eyes caught another familiar face mixed in with the strangers. My pulse quickened. I pulled out the picture: a teenage girl with round cheeks and spiky hair, posing with a snowboard. I never would have recognized her if Lex hadn’t shown me her picture just a couple of hours earlier.
“This is my cousin. Her name is . . . Ravenna.” It was lucky for me she had such a stupid name; it made it easy for me to remember. “After the town in Italy where she was born.”
Ms. Brindell raised an eyebrow and then, slowly, smiled. It had been a test. She wanted to see if I could pick out people from my past I wasn’t explicitly told to look for. I looked at the photographs more closely as I went through the rest, picking out the faces I recognized from Lex’s phone.
“This is my grandmother. She died when I was young. This looks like my best friend Andrew.” I could feel Lex and Patrick exchanging glances over my head, but none of us said a word. I flipped past a photograph of Mia on a swing set without comment and eventually reached the final picture, where a blonde woman and dark-haired man in formalwear danced at some kind of party. “This is my mom and dad.”
“You didn’t recognize your sister, Mia,” Ms. Brindell said.
I blinked. “She was only a baby the last time I saw her.”
She just nodded. I handed her the stack of pictures. Beside me, Patrick gasped and grabbed my wrist, and I jumped.
“My God,” he said, examining the small, dark patch of skin on the back of my hand, halfway between my thumb and forefinger. I could feel his hand shaking, and he looked from the spot up to me with wide eyes. “Jesus Christ.”
I frowned. Why was he—
“Mr. McConnell?”
Patrick dragged his gaze away from mine to look at Ms. Brindell. “You want proof?” he said shakily. “Check your file. Danny was born with this birthmark.”
Ms. Brindell looked at the spot on my hand and then down at the papers in front of her. Lex leaned forward to look too, and one of her hands flew to her mouth.
“You’re right. Café au lait spot above left thumb,” Ms. Brindell read from the report. She looked up at us and smiled. “I’m satisfied.”
“So . . . you’ll approve an expedited passport?” Lex asked breathlessly.
Ms. Brindell began to pack up her things. “We’ll get the paperwork started immediately. You can go home tomorrow, Daniel.”
? ? ?
Go home, go home, go home. The phrase thumped in my ears like a heartbeat as I packed my meager belongings.
? ? ?
The next morning, with my stiff new passport stuck in the pocket of my coat, I said good-bye to Alicia in front of the American Embassy. She hugged me and whispered in my ear.
“Good luck, Danny.”
Patrick beckoned from the town car he’d hired to take us to the airport. In that moment all I wanted was to go back to Short Term 8 with Alicia, to disappear again into the crowd there. I was right on the verge of getting everything I’d always wanted, but if I didn’t know they would catch me before I got five blocks, I would have run like hell.
Instead, I got into the car and watched Alicia wave to me until she was out of sight.
We sat in first class. The flight attendant brought Patrick and Lex glasses of champagne, which Lex quickly downed, and gave me a couple of warm cookies before we’d even taken off. The week before I’d been sleeping in a bus shelter and subsisting on bags of chips and candy bars pilfered from convenience stores.
I should have been happy. I shouldn’t have been struggling to swallow around the cookie that felt dry and tasteless in my mouth, but maybe happiness wasn’t something I was capable of anymore. Even if I was, I didn’t think I’d have been able to feel it over the fear pounding through my veins, like a tide that only came in, rising higher and higher inside of me until I could barely breathe.
They were going to be waiting at the airport when we arrived. The Tates. They would look at me and this would all be over, and it scared the hell out of me.
Because, of course, I wasn’t Daniel Tate.
? ? ?
I know I said I was going to tell you the truth. But I lied. It’s just what I do. Frankly, you have no one to blame but yourself if you believed me for even a second.
Everything from this point on is true, though. I swear. Not even I could make up what happened next.
? ? ?
I was screwed. Somehow I had fooled Patrick and Lex, but I wouldn’t fool the whole family. I couldn’t.
Lex caught my hand as I brought it to my mouth to bite at a stubby fingernail.
“Don’t be nervous,” she said, although she looked as uneasy as I felt. She lowered my hand back to my lap and squeezed my fingers. “Everyone’s going to be so happy to see you.”
“Who’s going to be there?” I asked.
“Just Mom and the kids. We didn’t want to overwhelm you.”
I nodded. Just Jessica, Daniel’s mother, and his siblings Nicholas and Mia. I’d found out from Patrick and Lex yesterday that Daniel’s father had been in prison for the past two years for tax evasion and embezzlement, and Mia had been too young when Daniel disappeared to even remember him, so that just left two people for me to worry about. It might as well have been a hundred, because I couldn’t imagine a mother looking into the eyes of a stranger and believing for a second that he was her son. No matter how badly she wanted him to be.
The flight attendant noticed my soda was almost gone and brought me another, along with a third flavorless cookie. This was my first trip on an airplane, and I tried to imagine how different the second one would be, when they’d be deporting me back to Canada and jail time after I was exposed.
This wasn’t what was supposed to happen.
Lex leaned over the armrest and pressed a kiss to my temple. She smelled of fancy shampoo and lavender laundry detergent, and all I could think of was how desperate and stupid she must be to swallow whole the ridiculous lies I’d told her. As she looked at me, her eyes started to shine. Ever since I’d met her, she’d been wide-eyed or trembling or crying, sometimes all three together. I should have felt sorry for her, or guilty for what I was doing, but I wasn’t capable of it.
“We’re together again, and that’s all that matters,” she said. “Everything’s going to be okay now.”