The Luna Cure

TWENTY-SEVEN

Pulling out a thick file, he turned around and set it open on the desk behind us, immediately flipping through the pages. "Obviously, you guys aren't the only wolves with the last name Abernathy, but this system isn't as perfect as it could be. So not all of this is about you guys." Dante explained, and about halfway through the file, he pulled out a single sheet.

"Here. Your immediate family tree." He handed me the paper.

Abernathy, Thomas married Grisham, Theresa, 17/6/1988.
29/8/1991, Abernathy, Maxwell George born.
13/5/1993, Abernathy, Nolan Flynn born.
6/2/1995, Abernathy, Isaac Quinn born.
7/3/1998, Abernathy, Harrison Ryan born.
16/11/1999, Abernathy, Hayden Alexander born.
28/12/2001, Abernathy, Florence Marie born.

"Here is your missing report," Dante handed me another sheet as I set down the family tree.

MISSING PERSON'S REPORT
NAME: Florence Marie Abernathy
DOB: 28/12/2001
SEX: F
DESCRIPTION: 8 years old, Brown hair, brown eyes
LAST SEEN: January 1st, 2007
CONTACT: Thomas Abernathy, Theresa Abernathy
BLOOD TYPE: O-
RESOLVED: No

I set the paper down on top of the first one, a picture of eight year old me glaring back at me at the bottom of the sheet. I flipped the paper over, shaking my head. "That doesn't mean anything."

Dante raised an eyebrow. "Actually, it very much does. It's not unusual for families with disagreements to formally separate from other relatives, to which we change our records. It's also not unusual for families with missing relatives to, after a while, come to the records department in Paris and ask to just get closure on their relative, so they have a funeral, make a gravestone, and put in records that the relative passed. It doesn't matter if they never found the body or got the answer, they can change the records without those things."

Dante leant next to me, grabbing the sheet I had turned over. "Your case was never resolved, meaning getting closure and finally being able to heal wasn't as important to them as the possibility that you were still out there. They didn't erase you, and if you want to, we can call them up and show you they haven't forgotten you."

I shook my head. "Melinda said there were five Abernathy kids, not six. They've gotten rid of me."

Dante flipped through the folder again, passing newspapers and photographs as he scanned. "Here. This is Maxwell's first news story, after he got cast for his first movie." Dante read the document closer, and then pointed to a paragraph. "Here. It's said he has four siblings from the moment he got famous. He probably just didn't want to have to talk about it on every talk show and have it on every headline when they discovered you were missing."

I shook my head again and stepped away from the wicked folder. Dante was wrong. They got rid of me because they wanted me gone. "I don't want to see anymore." I whispered, handing the documents back to Dante.

"Not the article about Local Venanson Girl Missing?" Dante held up a French article.

"No. Why do you have so much on my family?" I asked.

He let out a short laugh. "Before we went to electronic records, this was how we did everything. Obviously, your brothers are celebrities, but we're not going to put every name drop in your family record. Just start of career, end of career, marriages, pack changes, births and deaths. Your family also happens to be very large," Dante flipped backwards through, finding a document with a lot more writing on it. "Extended family tree, which relates you to about twenty more families in the past century." He handed it to me.