Catchfly: Seeing Stars

Chapter 44: I Fall Victim

December 26 – 9:01 AM

Grandma brushes through my hair. We've been in her bed since I got here, but we haven't shut an eye. I must have cried for an hour before I could even get out a sensible word. Then everything came out of me in such a non-chronological order, I wonder if she even understood me. I told her what happened with Cyrus, then I told her about visiting Walt Francis with Jace and how Ricardo followed me and Austin on Halloween. Then I started hyperventilating. Grandma calmed me down. She hasn't said much, but I think she hasn't on purpose. Any kind of stimulus might just send me down a spiral I can't get out of.

We've just been snuggled underneath her blankets for the last couple of hours. I've held onto her for comfort and safety all this time, afraid she might just vanish out of my life if I let her go for too long. As if my existence is beginning to fade.

"I can't go home, grandma." I whisper.

Grandma's hand pauses on my head. "Are you angry at them?"

"No," I shake my head abruptly. "No. They're my mom and dad. And I– I understand what happened. It's on paper and it happened, but... I don't feel it. Everything changed and at the same time, it didn't."

My grandmother made me text them that I'm with her, knowing they'd be worried sick. I threw my phone across the room after that, afraid to read their reaction. I'm not angry at them. I'm afraid of them.

Grandma always has the heat up high in her room, and I'm covered up to my armpits in her blankets, but I'm still freezing cold. My head is a mess, a collection of thoughts running through each other constantly, and my limbs feel numb, as if I'm not supposed to be in this body. As if I've taken over Paisley James' body for seventeen years, but it's not really mine. She's not real.

"Sweetheart," Grandma takes my hand. "Hayden and Larissa would have been in your life even if Joel and Evelyn had lived. They loved you so much."

"But they were never supposed to be my parents." I speak hoarsely. I notice I'm shaking my leg from left to right. I stop it, forcing myself to lay still. It's as if my body's been overly producing adrenaline for hours. I feel like I could run for three days straight.

"Did they even want kids?" I peer at grandma. Tears are dried on her own face. She must have cried as much as I have. It's so contradicting. I love this woman so much, and yet she is not really my family. How can I feel so close to her?

"They never thought about kids, really. They were so busy, even more than they are now." She says. This I know. My parents used to be traveling agents, constantly moving around the world together. They loved it. Maybe I got in the way of that.

"Joel and Evelyn asked them to be your guardians before you were even born, and they didn't even have to think about it. When Hayden had to find them in their house that horrible day... He said he went through the strangest sensation of devastating grief followed by intense relief, because when he went upstairs, he found you alive and well. Crying, screaming, as if you'd felt what happened."

I shut my eyes, trying to remember, and at the same time afraid to. My entire body seems to contradict itself; my two identities fighting each other, while I float somewhere in the middle.

"Were they ever going to tell me?"

"They've tried to. More than once." Grandma looks at me insistently. "They considered lying and telling you your parents died in an accident. They didn't want to put such a heavy story on your shoulders. But as you got older, you grew so curious." A smile twitches at her lips, but it disappears rather fast. "They knew that you would ask every question that popped into your head, you'd probably even need to see proof. You never took their word for anything. They thought it would be too painful for a young girl to learn her biological parents died the way Joel and Evelyn did, let alone learn the reason behind it. Hayden and Larissa didn't even know that themselves. They were afraid it'd drive you crazy."