London eventually stood up, emptied his beer bottle and threw it at the flames hard enough that the glass shattered. The flames burst upward but settled shortly. “By the way,” London said, “I found some of those notebooks.”

  Gabriel perked up, and then caught himself. “I forgot about those.” He hadn’t actually, but what excuse could he have to ask for them now? Suddenly he was working out excuses, reasons to get them from him.

  He considered sending in Luke but Mr. Blackbourne was right. He couldn’t send Luke in to steal those.

  But before he could come up with something, London retreated to his work truck that was parked not too far from the barn.

  Gabriel thought maybe that was the end of it, until London returned. He carried with him a short stack of notebooks, with the covers absolutely chockfull of artwork and words that Gabriel didn’t quite catch.

  Lyric’s notebooks.

  London held them in both hands, gazing at the covers, a frown on his face. Gabriel thought for a moment he’d sit and read through them. To remember his sister.

  And suddenly, he let go and tossed them.

  Right into the fire.

  Gabriel froze for just one moment. One second. It was pure panic. Pure terror. London was letting the journals burn. Just like he said his father would do.

  And in a flash, Gabriel reached in for those books.

  Pain seared his hands. He grasped the notebooks and quickly brought them to the wet, snow dusted grass. He dropped them, tore off his jacket and smothered any flames that might have still been lit around the edges.

  “What the shit, man?” London bellowed at him.

  Gabriel stopped moving. He couldn’t. His hands were reddening. He couldn’t talk either. Internally, he was screaming at the pain in his hands. Then as if realizing the ground was damp and cold, he lowered himself and pressed his hands to the dirt.

  London towered over him. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “You can’t burn them,” Gabriel seethed. He was in too much pain to hold back. Tears welled in the corner of his eyes. He needed medical help, but he couldn’t move. He wouldn’t walk away when there was a risk London would try to burn the notebooks again.

  “Who the hell are you to tell me...” London started up, some of his words slurring a little. He moved to scoop up the jacket. “I know what I’m doing. You’re not saving me from—”

  Gabriel panicked again and lunged at him, catching him in the side with a shoulder the best he could while avoiding touching anything with his still burning hands. “Lyric’s daughter!” Gabriel spat out in a heavy hiss. “She’s alive!”

  London stopped dead and staggered back, pulling away from Gabriel. “W...what?” He blinked at Gabriel, turning his head, seeming too confused.

  Gabriel’s lungs hurt because he was breathing air in and out in a way to help with the pain from his hands, even if it wasn’t helping. It made his voice sound like a continual grumbling hiss. “Samantha,” Gabriel breathed out. He had to say it. He wouldn’t understand otherwise. Gabriel sniffed heavily. “But that’s not her real name. Her real name is Sang.”

  London’s shoulders dropped and he paled. “How did you know?”

  “Because that’s her name!” Gabriel tested his hands, but they burned so bad, and the pain was getting worse by the second as the shock started wearing off. He needed real ice. He needed help, but he refused to move. He didn’t dare. Not until London understood and wouldn’t harm the books. “We came here, we disguised her, because she wanted to see where she came from without... we didn’t know why she was given to her father. He’s such a shit...”

  London quieted.

  And then he turned, walked away, back to his truck.

  He got in, he started the engine, and he pulled out, moving fast down the hill.

  Running away?

  Maybe. Gabriel now at least could move. He started down the hill. He’d have to send someone back for the notebooks.

  His hands were burning. He needed help. The RV was still parked nearby. Someone had to be in it. He’d have to run for it.

  The notebooks, however, were here. They weren’t burned.

  The rest... Gabriel didn’t know what would happen. But Sang deserved those notebooks.

  Every Day Matters Now

  Sang

  I sat in the back room, grateful for the reprieve.

  My meter was too full, at least for strangers, but I had braved the funeral. I didn’t understand about funerals before. I did now. Saying goodbye... it was a relief on the system. One last goodbye, and then you could move on.

  You couldn’t forget, but you could move on. It was like a silent permission to alleviate the grieving so next steps could be figured out.

  What the future held, I wasn’t sure. So much had changed since I’d been in Kentucky. So much more might still change before I left.

  But I was leaving. I had to.

  This wasn’t my place.

  Part of me was afraid I’d die if I remained.

  An epidemic of tragedies. This house, whatever was in it, maybe cursed in some way.

  I didn’t want to die. Not here. And I didn’t want to ask the others to remain here. There was too much to do, too much I wanted, that wasn’t here.

  Finally alone, and without Gabriel, I tuned out. I took out the MP3 player I’d been given and turned it on. I listened to it a lot when I got a chance. I knew the words and it was just comforting to hear them on repeat now.

  After a while, Mr. Blackbourne’s voice came in, clear and concise. My heart fluttered hearing it, especially knowing I could greedily listen whenever I wished.

  “Miss Sorenson,” he said. “I’m delighted by every moment with you. I look forward to every future date we might share, because the others we’ve been on are some of the fondest moments in my life now.”

  That part made me smile. We’d been out to share a meal, for various reasons, a few times, usually under the guise of following people and looking for information we needed.

  It delighted me he thought about those moments as dates.

  While I listened, I opened Gabriel’s notebook. I wasn’t really reading the words. I just looked at the incredible art. I touched the pages. Some of the images were waxy. Some pen marks had a lot of texture.

  Soon, I’d be back. I looked forward to being home with them.

  Despite the guilt of leaving. I thought maybe I’d be back. Maybe, after some time, I’d come and tell them who I was. I’d ask questions. I felt I needed to give them some time to grieve, maybe some time to forget about “Samantha.” I could give them a fresh connection.

  Did that mean I couldn’t be a ghost bird?

  I didn’t know the answer. Not yet. Maybe I could clear that up with Mr. Blackbourne or Lily later. All I knew was that I looked forward to being with my own people. I longed to walk out, down the hill, get into the RV and go back.

  While I did worry about my grandmother and my uncle, they had found life and happiness without me here. And with my grandfather gone now, it was like they had both had weights lifted. They no longer had to worry about my grandfather living here alone. The past was now in the past forever.

  I’d been listening and thinking for so long, I never heard her enter the room.

  I don’t know how long she had been standing there, but at some point, I realized there were eyes on me. I at first thought it was Gabriel.

  My grandmother, staring at me from the door she had closed behind her, had waited for me to notice her. She was still in all black, with a long skirt, and her white hair that framed her face. Her glasses seemed to reflect the white in her hair or the walls around us, but it seemed to highlight her eyes.

  Eyes that were like mine.

  I was just in time to rip out the earbuds as her lips started moving.

  “It’s about time you came back to find us,” she said in a soft, gravelly voice. She’d been talking to people for days, so her voice had worn down considerably.

  Silence filled in around us thickly. I didn’t know what to say.

  “Did you think that a little makeup could hide you?” She visibly swallowed. “You’re the spitting image of her.”

  I couldn’t look at her. My eyes burned and tears welled. I had been caught. When exactly, I wasn’t sure.

  But even Grace had noticed.

  I got on my knees on the bed, putting aside Gabriel’s notebook. “How long have you known?” I asked quietly.

  “Since you came to my house,” she said. “Grace pinned you. I hadn’t given you a close look when you came in but... she was right.” She took a step closer, her eyes never wavered from my face. She studied me. “You colored your hair but the roots are starting to show. And those contacts...”

  Again, I couldn’t speak. We weren’t as clever as we thought. Not with this. And yet this whole time, she never said anything about it.

  She put her palms together, in a prayer motion, and she brought her hands to her lips. “I don’t know why you didn’t want to tell me, but I guess I couldn’t take it anymore...”

  I lowered my head, gazing at the quilt on the bed. “I didn’t know anything about you,” I said in a hushed voice. Surprisingly, and maybe because I was exhausted, I was also without the energy to second guess what I was going to say. I simply blurted out my thoughts. “I didn’t even know... who I was... until a few months ago.”

  “They never told you?”

  I shook my head. “I just learned recently, about who was really my stepmother and my father...” I paused, unsure of this next one but just in case. “Is he really my father?”

  She lowered her prayer hands a little so she could speak over them. “I’m afraid so.”

  I don’t know why I asked. There were so many secrets, so much built-up mystery around everything, that I was starting to question all of it. “I didn’t mean to come and interrupt your life. I didn’t want to hurt anyone. I just wanted to... I don’t want anything. I just needed to know.”

  Charlotte finally crossed the room and came to the bed. She gingerly sat at the foot of it, an arm’s length away.

  Slowly she reached for my hand, took it in hers. Her hands were bony, but gentle. She still wore her wedding ring.

  “So do I,” she said softly.

  My lips parted. “What don’t you know?”

  “About you,” she said. Her voice was as gentle as could be. “The last time I saw you, you were just a little baby.”

  I swallowed thickly. “And I was given to my father... but I don’t know why that happened.”

  She breathed in deeply through her nose, held it and then let out the breath between her lips. “I never knew,” she said. She released my hands, stood up and walked around the bed. She paced what little space there was between the door and the bed. “When you were born, we hadn’t known Lyric was pregnant at all, she hid it from all of us. But I think she told her father right before you were born. Those two got along so well, you see. And she had to tell someone.”

  She sniffed, not looking at me, but I thought she was crying now. She touched gently at the corner of her eyes. “I was surprised, obviously, and concerned, because... I didn’t know. I was just getting used to the idea I had a granddaughter when... One day you were here, the next, you were gone.”

  “They didn’t tell you they were giving me away?”

  “No. And when I questioned them, they wouldn’t give any reason. Nothing that made sense. The best they could do was that they suspected you would die soon. You were so small. That they couldn’t bear to watch you die, and Lyric tried to say she would rather live thinking there was some chance you lived.” She rolled her eyes. “I didn’t believe any of it. Especially not with what happened after... when Lyric... when she died...” She stopped, and this time her shoulders shook and she was very visibly crying.

  I lowered my head and waited, unsure what to say. I closed my own eyes to stop my own tears. What secret did Lyric keep? That she felt forced to give me away?

  I hadn’t died. I hadn’t heard anything about any problems when I was a baby.

  Eventually grandmother sniffed again and wiped more at her eyes to stop her tears. “When she died, it was like he died that day, too. Whatever had happened, he never told a soul. I hadn’t even known who the father was, though I suspected it since London eventually pieced that part, especially when your father never returned back home for anything. My husband took Lyric out of school when she was young and I taught her at home. She never really saw many people outside the family. Her cousin would come by to check on her...” She stopped and shook her head. “It was my mistake. I should have made him let her continue school. We had so many fights about that.”

  She said she didn’t know much, but she knew a few things. “Why was she taken out of school?”

  “She wasn’t doing well,” she said. “Now I suspect it was ADHD. And she had such a wild imagination. She never listened to her teachers. She wasn’t a brat, but she never completed homework, and even the few times I tried to help her, she wouldn’t turn it in, even if she had it. Her father said he’d rather her be homeschooled. He thought she was going to become an artist anyway.”

  An artist.

  My mother.

  The story of her life sounded so tragic. Taken out of school. Left on the farm alone. The only person besides her immediate family to visit her might have been her older male cousin.

  Then she was pregnant, and she kept it a secret.

  For whatever reason, she decided to give me to him.

  And that was it. Either on purpose after or because she’d been too depressed after I was gone, she took her own life.

  In the wake of it all, it tore the rest of the family apart.

  “Did you try to find me?” I asked her.

  My grandmother nodded. “Until the day my husband discovered what I was doing. He didn’t want me to reach out for you. We argued every day of our life until the day I decided to move out. Years later... not soon enough...” She stopped herself and clasped her palms together again. “I never did forget. But after a while, I did give up. And I’m sorry I did. I think because he was so vehement about it. It made me worry that maybe he had been right. That you had died and he didn’t want to know for sure. And maybe I didn’t want to know either. It was better, for me, to imagine you could have been alive and happy than learn you were dead and gone, too.”

  I fell silent, taking in the information. As much as she wasn’t sure why the decision was made between my mother and my grandfather to give me away, especially to my father, everything else was starting to make more sense. Lyric was embarrassed by what happened.

  What Kota had said to me before, about how in small towns, a news article could abruptly change lives for an entire family, and having seen the number of people who had arrived to the funeral for my grandfather, what would happen if they learned about me? My father had been so desperate to keep me a secret, too. Enough to drive my stepmother near mad when she started to get sick.

  A secret my grandfather took to the grave. To avoid any more tragic fallout.

  My grandmother lowered herself onto the bed next to me. “Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked me. “How come you never told us when you got here?”

  “I didn’t know if I should,” I said. “And now... I don’t think we should tell anyone else.”

  She blinked at me. “What do you mean?”

  I looked up at her firmly, understanding now the ripple effect their long-held secret had on all of us. “Your husband, my grandfather, he defended this place.” My face stiffened and the emotion thickened in my throat. It was all making sense to me now. “When you left. When his son left. He let it happen so he could stay here and keep this secret. He warded off everyone. The local police. He did it to keep this family’s secrets away from the public eye.”

  My grandmother nodded solemnly. “I didn’t understand it. I was too angry...”

  I reached out, grasping at her wrist. I don’t know what possessed me. I held firm. “He was protecting you. And your son. He knew it. For as long as possible. Until he was too tired to protect it anymore.”

  Charlotte’s lip trembled. “Do you think so?”

  It was the only thing that made sense. Gabriel had been right before, when we had been coming to conclusions about what happened prior to this.

  “We can’t waste the effort he put in and sacrificed everything for. Maybe he created this problem. Maybe he should have told you, but... do we want to spend the rest of our lives answering for it?”

  I could just picture the town here discovering the truth. The police, they might come for me with questions. They’d go to my father and might arrest him. There would be a trial. In the name of judicial justice, our lives would be torn up more than this.

  There was no need for any of us to suffer anymore. Seeking justice would erupt all of our lives and affect the rest of our lives.

  I wouldn’t let that happen. We didn’t need justice. Not that sort. We needed peace. To move on.

  I had to be a secret forever.

  ♥♥♥

  My grandmother sat with me for a while.

  I told her about how I felt. How I needed to be kept a secret.

  She agreed with me.

  “You don’t think my father should be in jail for what he did?” I asked, just checking her feelings on the topic.

  “I don’t think it was entirely his fault,” she said. “Lyric swore he didn’t rape her. It was the only reason he lived through the experience, or my husband would have murdered him before I even knew what happened. My daughter was just lonely and so isolated, she encouraged a relationship that shouldn’t have existed. And maybe he should have known better, since he was older, but I don’t blame him entirely.” She touched her forehead, rubbing gently. “That was my fault. At least I was partially to blame.”

  After we agreed to the secrecy, the conversation got lighter. She asked me about where I’d been living, how I grew up and what happened to me.

  I gave her a shorter version of it. For now. I kept to my earlier years.

  No need to go into what happened with my stepmother.

  No need to talk about the Academy.