"Money, Money, Money" [2] G. Hawthorne

30 - dad, that you?

Alisa barged in to my room.

"I have news."

"Christ woman, what happened to hi, hello, how're you doing? I could've been changing!"

She proceeded to ignore me like any good species of Alisa.

"The DNA tests came back, he's your father."

I jumped from my bed.

"Well, if that's true, then what about Avery."

"That's the thing Kayla, Toby is your father, but he isn't Avery's."

*********************

"Hello sister dearest." I greeted, entering Avery's room.

She was in there alone but I had brought a Lena as well as an Isaac just in case.

"I need to see your birth certificate." I said.

About 30 minutes later I had the certificate in my hands.

I gasped when I saw something.

Her date of birth and mine were different.

I did the math... well I'm shit at math so Isaac did the math and my mom got pregnant with me only a month after delivering Avery.

By the looks of it I was also premature by a month or so.

Welp, I was surprising people from the start I suppose.

"So, Ricky is your dad, but he's not mine?"

"Looks like."

"Well shit!"

"Looks like." Isaac and Lena said.

*******************

"Kayla there's something you should see!"

Luke rushed me through the halls of Hawthorne house back to Toby's old wing.

"I've already been here."

"Yeah but did you see this?"

There was a box, and inside it?

A bunch of letters, from Toby Hawthorne to my mom.

****************

It was one thing to read Toby's love letters to my mother. It was another entirely to read hers to him. She sounded like herself, so much that I could hear her voice with every single word I read.

She loved him. The muscles in my chest tightened. It hurt to love him, and she loved him anyway. I breathed—in and out. He left her, and she loved him anyway. That string of thoughts cycled through my head on repeat as we drove back to the airstrip where the jets awaited. What my mom and Toby had—it was tragic and messy and all-consuming, and if the postcards made one thing clear, it was that she would have done it all again.

"Are you okay?" Grayson asked beside me, like it was just the two of us in this SUV, like we weren't surrounded by Oren's men. There were two other SUVs, one in front of us and one at our rear. There were four armed men, including Oren, in this car alone.

"No," I told Grayson. "Not really." My entire life, I'd grown up knowing that I was enough for my mom. She hadn't dated. She hadn't wanted or needed a damn thing from Ricky. Her life was full of love. She was full of love— but romance? That wasn't something she'd needed. It wasn't something she'd wanted. It wasn't even something she was open to—and now I knew why.

Because she'd never stopped loving Toby.

It was getting harder to ignore Grayson's presence beside me. My eyes stung, even though there was zero reason for me to be crying.

I stared through my tears at the postcards my mom had written to Toby and forced myself to keep reading. Soon, the focus of my mom's writing shifted from what they'd had to a different kind of love story. From that point on, every single postcard was about my sister.

Avery took her first steps today.

Avery's first word is "uh-oh!"

Today, Avery invented a game that combines Candy Land, Chutes and Ladders, and checkers.

There was one letter however, entirely about me.

"She would've loved you Toby. She's got the same rebel in her. The same urge to prove everyone around her wrong."

On and on it went, up until the postcards stopped. Up until she died.

My hand shook, holding the last postcard, and Grayson's hand made its way to mine.

"She wrote these," I said, my voice catching in my throat, "to Toby about me." It couldn't have been clearer reading them: He really was my father. I'd been working off that assumption for so long that it shouldn't have come as a shock.

That night we had to go out for some fancy ass ball,

My mind was full with images of them both—and with the words my mother had written to Toby.

The night air was cold and getting colder. As I walked toward the car that'd take me out of town to where the ball was, a brutal wind picked up, then gave way to sudden and utter stillness. I heard a single, high-pitched beep, and the world exploded. Into fire. Into nothing.

******************

Everything hurt. I couldn't hear. I couldn't see. When blurred images finally began to form, all I saw was fire. Fire and Grayson, standing a hundred feet away from me.

I waited for him to come running. I waited.

I waited.

He didn't.

And then, there was nothing.

The world around me was dark, and then there was a voice. "Let's play a game."

I couldn't tell if I was standing up or lying down. I couldn't feel my body.

"I have a secret."

If I had eyes, I opened them. Or maybe they were already open? Either way, I did something, and the world was flooded with light.

"I'm tired of playing," I told my mom.

"I know, baby."

"I'm so tired," I said.

"I know. But I have a secret, Kayla, and you have to play —just one more time, just for me. Okay, baby? You can't let go."

I heard a long and distant beep. Lightning tore through my body. "Clear!" a voice yelled.

"Come on, Kayla," my mom whispered. "I have a secret...."

Another round of lightning tore through me. "Clear!"

I wanted to stop breathing. I wanted to go where the lightning and the fire and the pain couldn't touch me.

"You have to fight," my mom said. "You have to hang on."

"You're not real," I whispered. "You're dead. So either this is a dream, and you're not even here, or I'm..."

Dead, too.

*************

WC: 951

Turns out the stress and stu(dying) paid off. I topped literature (go me) so yea