And while Cameron had dove into her grief with hate and finding me a good punching bag, Alice bounced between a million different emotions at once.
She was only seven, but the mind behind those dewy gray eyes was of at least a 40-year-old.
When she wasn’t calling her sister names, she was off in her own little world of make-believe, constantly following me around the large home that didn’t feel like my own.
Cameron had resorted to ice and building a wall for herself.
While Alice had become a stage-five clinger, who wouldn’t let me out of her sight. Thankfully, I worked from home, but even then, I knew we would have to nip this in the bud at some point.
She didn’t cling to the others who visited, as the Wilder women had been by daily to make sure that we had help, but Alice only left my sight if she wanted to go to the backyard and play make-believe in stories of her own.
Maybe stories in which her mom and dad were alive, and she wasn’t forced to live with her evil aunt.
Okay, perhaps I was placing Cameron’s visage on my own, but what else was I supposed to think?
It had been a month of constant fighting, tears, and figuring out what we were supposed to do.
And I was failing. Failing to the point that I knew if I didn’t find my feet soon, I was going to lose everything.
My phone buzzed again, and I ignored it. I was a week behind on work, which, in the grand scheme of things, wasn’t too bad, but as my own boss, I needed to get back on track. I had three mouths to feed now, and that meant I couldn’t think about my future the way I had been.
To think, I had been worried about being too close to Brooks, wondering if I was going to be alone until the end of time.
Now I would never be alone. There would be two little girls who constantly needed me, and I had no idea how to do this mom thing.
But I wasn’t a mom. I was an aunt. An aunt who hadn’t been allowed to be near these two their entire lives. And now I was somehow supposed to raise them to be good people. I was already failing.
“Cameron. I know you don’t like it here. I know everything is terrible. But you can’t yell at me like that.”
Again, I didn’t know how to do this parenting thing. I knew I shouldn’t allow her to yell at me, to scream, to call me names, or say that she hated me. But I wasn’t sure how to be the disciplinarian. I didn’t even know this girl. She was nothing like the gap-toothed child that I had last seen. I still couldn’t come to terms with the fact that my sister had taken them from me. Had joined her not-quite-a-cult and had ripped them from my life. But wishes and thinking of the past weren’t going to help anything.
Especially not now.
“And Alice, don’t call your sister names.”
“I’m sorry,” Alice said quickly, her eyes filling with tears. She wrapped her arm around my waist, and I held her close, running my hand through those soft, nearly pink curls.
“Oh, I see how it is. You love her more than me. Why? Because she looks more like you? And I look more like my mom? My mom that you didn’t even love.”
I nearly staggered back at the venom in her tone. Because nothing of what she said was correct. I had loved my sister. I still did. Even when I hated what she had done and would never understand the why of it. I loved her.
And, considering my sister and I were twins, the only thing that had been different was our heights. Her saying that I looked like Alice versus her made no sense.
But the preteen was trying to find things to hate about me, and now she was reaching for anything she could.
I was already so tired, and I didn’t know what I was supposed to do now.
“Cameron. School starts soon, and I know that we have all of the paperwork and lists, thanks to Miss Alexis. Why don’t we go through those and then we can go shopping for what you need.”
“I don’t want to go to school. Not in some hick town.”
I nearly crossed my eyes because although we were in a small town, we were right at the edge of the district where she would be going to a larger school than she had at her old home. But explaining that once again would only lead to more tantrums. And I didn’t know if I had that in me.
“Cameron. We need to pick out the rest of your school things.”
She would be starting seventh grade, and in this area, at least, that was still middle school. Sixth through eighth went to one school, and then ninth would be in high school.
“I’m not going to know anybody there, and everyone will be friends from when they were kids. I’m going to hate it.”
