“Not good.”
“You look weird, like your eyes aren’t focusing right.”
Jen said, “I think she’s in shock.”
He said, matter-of-factly, “Not a reason for it, you can’t let him get in your head, Lexi. He’s manipulating you.”
“How…?”
“He knows you’re kicking him out of the back-shack. He’s a sociopath, he’s been working on you for days, now he found a weird in?—”
“Was I adopted?”
Cooper’s eyes went wide. “Lexi, no! You can’t listen to him, your family is your family!”
“How are you so sure?”
“Because this story is ridiculous, told by a nutjob, out of nowhere. It’s not true. Your parents loved you, you loved them. You were raised by them here in this house, passed down through your family on your ancestral land. I’ve never met anyone with as long an ancestral family line. You have roots, how can you… jeez.” He frowned. “Come on, Lexi, you live in the same house your great-grandparents built with their own hands.”
He looked at Jen, “What are you telling her?”
“I’m telling her that she’s probably not adopted.”
“Probably?Seriously, Jen?”
She shrugged and then said this, and it chilled me to my core. “I mean, her trust fund is really odd. Her family wasn’t that rich. How’d they leave her so much? She doesn’t even have all of it yet, and she’s never had a job. It’s probably millions of dollars, easy. You and I talked about it, you agreed.”
The world slowed down around me, a rushing sound around my head, inside my head. I barely heard Cooper saying, “Aw, come on, Jen, that’s not fair — that was when I first met her. We talked about it, sure, but you know the deal. Her parents had money, passed down from her grandparents, good investments, you know…”
But I stopped listening, my dream was playing out, me in a dark corner with light flickering on my cheek from a fire in a hearth, so scared, watching a rough strange man beat a man, a kind man, who cared for me, who I loved, while a woman, who cared for me, begged for his life, and then I was snatched, and carried away, a rough hand over my mouth.
I took a step back, shaking my head.
No no no no no.
In the dream I had been dropped down onto a riverbank and something was thrust into my hands, the man had yelled, ‘Hold it!’
And I looked down.
It was a vessel.
I had held a vessel in my hand.
I shook my head.
No no no no no,I turned around, stumbling. I almost fell down, arms out, lurching down my hallway. It was hard to keep on my feet, my balance was off, my vision obscured, my heart yammering in my chest, my knees weak.
Inside my head, that little girl’s voice, ‘Where they go? Go back! Take me back!’
‘Och nae, lass, daena let go?—’
Why couldn’t I remember what happened next?
Where had that little girl gone, where had she ended up?
I shoved out the front door and out onto the porch.
Torin was sitting on a boulder at the end of the driveway.
