I looked over at Maddy, and she was having a whole conversation with me in total silence. Beth and Janet had paid for my nursing school. They never got a dime from Amber.
This information saturated me. Soaked into my core.
And was this why I’d barely heard from her these last three years? Because she didn’t need money?
Where was the money now? Was it gone?
But of course it was gone. That’s why she’d come looking for me. That’s why she’d latched on to Neil.
That’s why she was stealing his watches and cuff links.
I felt dizzy. I had to grip the banister to keep from swaying. Justin sensed it and he came up behind me and put a gentle hand under my elbow. I was going to be sick.
I was about to ask for a bathroom when a man burst through the front door. He stopped in the foyer and stared at me. “Holy fucking shit…” He put his hands on his head. “Holy shi—She looks just like her. It’s like Amber, twenty years ago.”
Daniel cleared his throat. “This is Doug, my best friend.”
“Fuck, sorry,” Doug said. He put out a hand and I limply shook it. He introduced himself to Justin and then Maddy.
Alexis was watching me. Then she turned to Doug. “Doug, I think we should catch up later. This is probably pretty overwhelming for everyone.”
“Shit, right,” he said. “Yeah. Call me. Call me the second you want me to come back over.”
He backed out the door, looking at me like I was a ghost.
I blinked around the house. There were black-and-white photos on the walls. The people had my face. My eyes. My nose.
“Is that her?” I asked. Daniel nodded.
There was a picture of Amber at the base of the staircase. I’d never seen a photo of her as a kid. I only knew it was her because she looked like me. She’d been twelve, maybe thirteen. She was sitting on the back of an old pickup truck with a bunch of other kids at a drive-in. She was smiling the way she did when she was okay.
“What would she do when she came here?” I asked, turning back to my brother.
Daniel shook his head. “Give Grandpa grief? Get money out of Grandma? Go on a bender? It was never good when she came.”
“Do you have pictures of your grandparents?” I asked. “Our grandparents,” I corrected.
“Yeah, lots. Come on.”
We moved into a living room and he sat me on a sofa. Maddy and Justin took the two chairs, Alexis sat next to Daniel as he set a photo album on the coffee table.
He opened the cover. “This is William and Linda.”
He flipped through to show me pictures of two people with kind eyes.
An old man, manning a barbeque with a GRILL MASTER apron on. A middle-aged woman, holding a little boy no older than Chelsea. The boy was laughing and she was hugging him on her lap. Daniel.
Pictures of the two of them standing next to an eighteen-year-old Daniel at his high school graduation. Birthday parties and Daniel blowing out candles. Homemade Halloween costumes and William at some bar calling a Bingo game. Linda holding up a pie she made at Christmas with a Christmas tree behind her here, in this living room.
They seemed warm. Friendly.
I swallowed. “Did you have a good childhood?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Daniel said. “It was a great childhood.”
“Were they good people?”
I saw him study me. “They were the best people I’ve ever known.”
We sat there in silence.
“Was your childhood good?” he asked.
It took me a long time to answer. “No.”
I stared at the album. The picture on the page was kids. A lawn full of kids, playing in the sprinklers. My cousins. My brother.
I had been robbed. This life, this family, had been stolen from me.
This was my alternate universe, laid out in full color.
And then Daniel flipped to another page and there was a picture of a twentysomething Amber. Sitting in a lawn chair drinking one of her Bloody Marys.
She’d been here. But where was I?
“What year is this?” I asked. But I think inside I already knew.
Daniel turned the page and the date was scrapbooked onto the bottom.
