All three men looked at me as if they could tell I’d had enough.
“Alright,” Adam said. “Let’s go look.”
We all fanned out amidst the crowd. Everyone had gone back to their dinners and conversations, and since I was no longer sprinting in a panic-run inside the room, they paid us no attention as we scanned the room. We glanced occasionally through the crowd at each other to see if anyone had found anything yet and to keep tabs on each other so that no one went missing again.
I didn’t see her anymore. I started to worry that maybe the woman had left or that maybe Michael was right and that this whole thing was just my mind playing tricks on me, but the next time that I looked up to give all the guys a glance, Rob tilted his head toward the hallway as if he had found something.
We all followed him out and there she was.
The woman stood at the end of the empty hallway and Rob stood looking at her. Michael and Adam came in behind me as they stepped into the hallway.
“Paula?” Michael said from behind me in shock.
“No,” I answered before the woman had a chance to. “That’s not my mother.”
I could tell it wasn’t her even from here. But she did look a lot like mom. The resemblance was uncanny.
“Hello Lisette,” she said cordially.
“Who are you?” I asked.
The woman smiled, and it was like staring at a not-quite-there version of my mother. “I’m your Aunt Naomi. I suppose it’s been a long time and you don’t remember me, do you?”
She was right, at first, I couldn’t remember her at all. I didn’t even think I had an aunt. But then it started to vaguely come back to me as childhood memories often do in blurry and fragmented pieces when triggered.
“I do remember you,” I said as I walked slowly closer to her. “You’re mom’s sister.”
“Your mom had a sister?” Michael asked. “I never knew that.”
I nodded mindlessly. “Yeah, when I was really small. You used to come over a lot and then you stopped,” I said as I tilted my head. “What happened to you? Where did you go?”
He snickered. “Let’s just say your father didn’t make it easy,.”
“Well, my dad didn’t make a lot of things easy,” I huffed. “What are you doing here? And why were you hiding from me in the crowd when I saw you?”
“First things first,” she said. “Who are all these handsome men?”
“Michael, Adam, and Rob,” I said very quickly in order to get to the answers to my important questions. “Naomi, what are you doing here?”
“I like to crash a good Goldshire party every once in a while,” she laughed. “No, I’m just kidding. I came to see you take your place as acting Headmistress. I’ve been waiting a long time to see that damn school fall into the right hands.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Naomi, you know that I’m Headmistress of Lineage, not Goldshire, right? Mom was an alumni of Goldshire.”
“I know,” she said. “It’s all quite a convoluted mess if you ask me, but you’re running the right school, don’t you worry about that.”
I drew in a curt breath. “Was it you that started all the whispers about how I should be the Headmistress?” I asked, seeing as how she seemed so zealous about it.
And yet, she simply shrugged. “Yes, of course it was. I needed to make up for all that lost auntie time by helping you out now.”
“Helping me out? I appreciate it Aunt Naomi, but things have been going fine.”
That was kind of a lie due the recent events over the past few days, but before then everything had been great at least.
But, she saw right through my lie. “Oh no dear, I could see that they were not. First you had your father’s bastard son getting in your way. Then all of these silly side-projects that you think will bring back the dead. And now you’ve got some sort of boy band entourage. Really dear, you need my help.”
A chill crawled up my spine, starting at my tailbone and reaching all the way to the back of my neck. And Michael stepped in with the question that was tumbling around heavily in my mind.
“How did you know about all of those things?” Michael asked her.
“Hush,” she told him as she lifted her finger into the air to signal that he should be quiet. “I wasn’t even talking to you.”
Then, her attention turned back to me. “Honestly Lisette, your mother would be so disappointed. Oh, and a cottage in Asheville? What is our family turning into now? You’re just lucky that I came when I did.”
“When exactly did you come?” Adam asked her.
Naomi rolled her eyes at him. “See?” she said as she waved a disregarding hand in the air toward him. “This is why we can’t have nice things.”
Oh my god. I knew instantly what was happening now.
“Aunt Naomi,” I said. “Where did you say you had gone to all those years?”
“Away.”
Yep, that’s what I thought.
“We need to leave,” I said to Michael, who was now standing right by my side.
He took my hand to walk away and the other two men were close behind us.
