Rare (12 page)

I stepped between them all. “I don’t know what’s going on either, but we’re not going to figure it out like this. Joe, come in and shut the door. Ash, go put a fucking shirt on.”

Yeah, because it wasn’t beyond me to be excited by him half-dressed and all riled up.

Joe did as he was told, but it took a shove to get Ash to move from where he’d planted his feet in the doorway.

I hustled him back into the bedroom and kicked the door shut. “Calm down. This doesn’t mean anything; she’s probably as confused as you are.”

Ash yanked a drawer open. He was silent while he pulled an old T-shirt over his head before he turned back to me and ran a hand through his unruly hair. “This is too weird,” he said, almost to himself as much as me. “She shouldn’t be here.”

“Well, she is. And that means you have to go out there and deal with it. Getting pissy with Joe isn’t going to change anything.”

“I know. It’s … I hate people looking at me like that. It makes me want to deck them.”

“You’re not hitting Joe.”

“
I know
.”

We stared at each other for a moment as we both considered what was about to happen. I hadn’t noticed Ash appear until Danni had balked, and it made me wonder how much he’d heard. The way it had played out so far, nothing could surprise me.

I stepped closer and laid a cautious hand on his arm. “Look, she wants to talk, is all. Maybe she’s worried you don’t like her. You’re a big part of Joe’s life, and you took one look at her and ran in the opposite direction. She probably just wants to be friends.”

Ash rolled his eyes. “Don’t patronize me, Pete. I know I was wrong, okay? Go out there and tell Joe I’ll be out in a minute.”

There was nothing I could do but give him the moment he needed. Defeated, I left him alone in the bedroom.

I found Joe and Danni in the kitchen. They sat at the battered old table. I looked between them, trying to gauge their expressions, but it was hard. All I could sense was an impending shitstorm. I snagged a stray sweatshirt from the back of the couch and put it on as I pulled out a chair opposite Joe.

The silence was heavy. I felt like I should say something, but without warning, and much quicker than I’d anticipated, Ash appeared and slipped like a ghost into the one remaining chair. He ignored me to his left, and Joe to his right. His gaze found Danni’s, and it was clear that Joe and I were there as spectators only.

“W
HY
DO
I know you?”

“You don’t.”

“I do.”

“You don’t.”

“Goddammit!”

Danni drove her fist into the table. She had begun patiently, her voice low and even, but as Ash’s trademark reticence got under her skin, she got angry all over again.

Joe and I watched it all with wide eyes. The conversation had started badly and only gotten worse. Danni thought she knew Ash. She couldn’t say if she’d ever seen him before, but something about him
felt
familiar… like some cosmic bullshit you read about in the back of crappy magazines.

Ash thought it was madness, and from the look on Joe’s face, he did too, but my mind was in overdrive. It was a scenario I’d heard before, and back then, the answer had been devastating.

No, this isn’t the same.

The rational side of my brain reasoned that Ash had lived—if you could call it that—in Philadelphia for five years. It was also Danni’s home city, though she’d spent the past few years at college in Seattle. There was every possibility she
did
know him, by sight if nothing else. Ash was a street artist. People saw him—they watched him work.

Maybe she had too? Who knew?

But unless there was another chick walking around that city who looked a hell of a lot like Danni, none of it explained the drawing festering away in Ash’s sketchbook. They’d already established that Danni had indeed been in Philadelphia at the same time as Ash and Ellie at the end of the summer. However unbelievable it was, for me, an impossible picture was beginning to come together.

“Where were you born?” Danni asked.

Ash sighed. It was the second time she’d tried that question, and the second time he’d ignored her. This time, I kicked him under the table. “Tell her,” I said. “Tell her where you were born.”

“I don’t know where I was born.”

Technically, it was true. Ash hadn’t been born in a hospital, and there were no records of him at all until he was taken into care. By then, his mother was dead. His birthday was an estimate, guessed at by a well-meaning social worker. They only knew how old he was because he was just about able to tell them. That part of his child services file haunted me, but it wasn’t something that ever seemed to bother him. Until now, it had been relatively unimportant.

Danni sat back in her seat and listened as Ash explained things he’d never explained to anyone before. Then she folded her arms across her chest. Her eyes seemed to flash with something akin to relief. “That sounds familiar,” she said. “More familiar than you’d think.”

Ash raised an eyebrow. “Excuse me?”

“You were born in Texas, right?”

“I think so.”

“How old was your mom?”

Ash frowned. His defensive stance was beginning to fade, and instead he looked plain confused. “What?”

“My mom was sixteen.”

I swung my gaze to Danni.

“I was born in Philadelphia,” she went on. “My mom was a drug addict, and as soon as the authorities saw her with a baby, they took me away. I was adopted almost immediately. I never saw her again.”

Ash’s pale skin blanched to a sickly white, but his almost undetectable nod was all the encouragement Danni needed to continue.

“My parents told me I was adopted from the beginning. They loved me like their own, enough to be honest with me from the start. I was curious about where I came from, but not enough to look into it until my adoptive mother passed away.”

Ash licked his lips. “When did she die?”

“When
I
was sixteen. Ironic, huh? At the age my biological mother gave birth to me, I was saying good-bye to the woman who’d picked up her slack.”

Anger glittered in Ash’s guarded eyes, but it was gone before anyone except me would have detected it. I wondered who it was for—his mother or Danni.

“I’m sorry.”

Danni shrugged. “Don’t be. My dad gave me my child services file the day after she died. It broke my heart when I found out she was dead. It was like a door closed in my face. After that, I did a little digging, and it gave me a new insight into the woman who gave me up so easily. She didn’t fight for me, but she did everything she could to keep my brother.”

Joe slapped his hand on the table. “Your
what
? How the hell would you even know that?”

“Because I
looked
,” Danni snapped. “Do you really think I found out she was dead and then forgot all about her?”

“Oh my God.” Joe shook his head. “That’s you all over, isn’t it? Why can’t you ever leave anything alone?”

Danni narrowed her eyes, the fury in her gaze clear. “Why would I leave it alone? You think she didn’t matter? That her life stopped when they took me away?” Danni cut a glance at Ash. “Clearly it didn’t.”

I’d heard enough. Ash looked like he was going to be sick or pass out, and we’d been through enough together for me to know either reaction was highly possible. I leaned forward and put my elbows on the table. “What are you trying to say?”

Danni tore her eyes away from Ash with obvious difficulty. “My mother ran away from the authorities when she was pregnant with her second child. She escaped from Philadelphia and she was never found. Not while she was alive, at least. She died in Texas in 1989. Her baby would have been about three years old.”

She shot a nervous glance at Joe before she turned back to Ash. “I don’t know what I’m trying to say, and I know you probably think I’m a complete psycho, but I know you’re from Texas…. I know you grew up in foster care. I look at you, and I see something I recognize. I’m sorry, Ash, I shouldn’t have come here… it’s just, I wanted it to make sense. I’m sorry.”

I watched the fight drain from her, and for a moment I was transfixed by the distress in her eyes. It stirred a familiar feeling in me: an urge, a need to protect, a sensation that up until that moment had been solely reserved for Ash. The feeling unnerved me. In an effort to disperse it, I chanced a glance at Joe. I wished I hadn’t. As he met my eyes and shook his head in disbelief, it was clear he was completely mystified.

Danni dropped her gaze to the table, defeated, but as Ash’s silence went on and on, both she and Joe remained oblivious to the fact that what she was suggesting wasn’t as shocking to him as it should have been; unbelievably, it was something that, together, we’d already considered.

Ash avoided my gaze, but I couldn’t let him ignore it. Danni had seen something she thought she knew, and she’d been brave enough to confront it. Ash knew better than anyone how it felt to doubt your own mind. I wasn’t going to let him leave it like this.

I opened my mouth and drew a breath in, but he cut me off, leaning forward and mirroring my stance with his elbows on the table. To the casual observer, he seemed relaxed, but I knew better. Beneath the deadly calm he exuded, a storm raged, a storm that could only get worse.

“I don’t know what you want me to say. Everything you say is true—I was born in Texas, my mom’s dead…, I even have a sister out there I only just found out about. But you’re not going to convince me you’re her. Coincidence has had its day with me already. I’m done.”

I stared at him for a long moment. Despite everything we’d been through, the convoluted way his mind worked was a mystery to me, but I understood the blank look in his eyes now. Accepting new people into his life was difficult for him at the best of times. It was like he didn’t get why people would bother. Me, Ellie, Joe. It had taken us all a long time to break him down, and even then, he only trusted us as much as he had to. There were still days he looked at me like he didn’t believe I was real.

This? This was so fucking surreal that for once his inability to trust his own mind made sense.

And it was so him to sit in silence for as long as possible before he let fly with a couple of sentences that effectively killed the conversation dead, but on this occasion, it wasn’t enough. Not because Danni didn’t accept his words, or even because she didn’t believe him, but because, for once, I wasn’t going to let things slide. We’d learned that lesson the hard way.

Ash had never let me tell him about the girl in his child services file. The day I told him about his sister, he’d clammed up and shoved the file right back at me. Back then it was too much for him, and he couldn’t take it in. If he had, he’d have known the only reason the girl’s name was there was because she’d put it there. The sister he didn’t know existed had been looking for him for years. She’d left her name with the authorities in Texas so
he
could find
her
if he ever wanted to. It had been a long shot. The authorities had lost track of Ash when he was fifteen, but at the time, it was probably all she had.

There was a simple way to clear it up. I’d given the file back to David months ago, but the name of the girl was forever inscribed in my head. If Danni’s name was a match, then, fuck. Whatever was going on was only beginning.

“Do you know your brother’s name?”

Three sets of eyes turned on me, but only Danni’s held any glimmer of hope.

Ash cursed softly. “Don’t start that shit with me again, Pete.”

Joe’s eyebrows about disappeared into his hairline, but I ignored both him and Ash’s barely contained fury, focusing on Danni. “Do you know it?”

“Yes.”

I glanced at Ash one more time before I made up my mind. “Well, I know Ash’s sister’s name, too, so if they’re not the same, we’re done here. Got it?”

I pulled a discarded sketch pad from the center of the table and tore a blank page out of the back. Ash bristled. Him and his fucking precious sketchbooks. “Write it down, okay? I’ll do the same.”

Danni took her half of the torn page and the pencil I slid her way. For a few seconds, the only sound in the room was the scratch of lead on paper, but all too soon, it was time to show my hand.

I handed over the page. Danni turned it over and scrutinized the name I’d scribbled down. Her mouth dropped open and she burst into tears. Joe was only seconds behind her as she fled from the room.

My arm seemed unbearably heavy as I reached for the scrap of paper she’d left behind. Though I knew what I would find, I turned it over and read the name she’d written. Ash leaned forward, reading it upside down, and before I could even take a breath, I was alone in the room.

I read the name over and over as the front door slammed, but it never changed, and neither did the name beside it. There they were in black and white—Ashley Fagin and Daniela Bordeen. Brother and sister—separated their whole lives until now.

I
DON
’
T
know how long I sat alone at the table. It could’ve been seconds, minutes, or even hours. I was stunned, frozen in place, but at the same time, a strange feeling crept over me, a sensation that something was falling into place.

Joe reappeared some time later. A belated glance at the clock revealed he’d only been gone twenty minutes. He hovered in the doorway, his expression one of utter confusion, like he’d been dropped in the twilight zone.

“This is horseshit,” he said. “I can’t believe you’re going along with
it.”

I shoved my chair back. I felt sorry for him, I really did. Danni had a dream, and Ash a nightmare, but it was painfully clear Joe didn’t have either. At least I’d had some prior warning. Part of me blamed my inclination to believe the impossible on sleep deprivation, but, despite his determination to push it all away, Ash was right about one thing: coincidence had proved true before, and all the evidence I’d seen so far pointed one way. “I’m not going along with anything.”