Chapter 48

My eyes rake over Sadie: her jeans, her gold wedding band, her neat, familiar ponytail. The same safe, reliable person she’s been all summer long. “Excuse me?”

“Do you want to sit?” she asks, gesturing to one of the baby chairs.

“No.” I’m running my thumb over all my fingertips in turn. Not even counting, just using the motion of it to keep myself still.

“Audrey.” Silas takes a step toward me, but I can’t rip my eyes off Sadie. “Please sit.”

“I don’t want to sit. Tell me what’s going on.”

Sadie glances at Silas before looking back at me. “Okay,” she says, drawing a deep breath. “Your mom had another daughter. Sixteen years before you.”

I realize that I’m shaking my head, and make myself stop.

“When she was twenty,” Sadie says. She takes a step closer to me, and I mirror it with a step back. It smells like cardboard and school supplies in here. “She gave her up for adoption. It was—” Sadie hesitates, lifts her hands to her own chest like she can’t manage to speak the word me.

“No,” I say, but Sadie keeps going.

“I got the court records when I was eighteen.” When I’m silent, she says, “The book came out when I was nine—seven years before you were born. When I found out who she was, I sent a letter asking if we could meet. But she didn’t want to meet.”

“She didn’t want to meet,” I repeat, my voice flat.

“The response was from her team,” Sadie says. “But that’s what it said.”

Her team. Magnolia.

“It’s not true,” I say. “She would have told me.” But even as I speak, I feel something clicking into place: The black hole of my mother before Letters to My Someday Daughter, her life before the limelight that she never talks about. Sadie’s notes in Letters—all those annotations about making your own choices about parenthood, about the “context” of my mother’s life while she was writing, about her response—“With Audrey?”—when Sadie asked for her birth story. And the book’s dedication, To her. Always allegedly about me, though I didn’t exist to be “her” when she wrote it.

People describe rooms as spinning, when your whole life tips on its axis. But nothing spins around me—it’s like I melt in the center of it all instead. Like I’m something less human than I was before I heard this, my atoms ceasing to exist the way they used to.

“Would she have told you?” Sadie says, and I squeeze my fisted hand so tightly the tendons over my knuckles ache. “Audrey—”

“Does my mom know who you are?”

“No.” Sadie shakes her head. “I didn’t identify myself in the letter. I didn’t want her to know who I was unless she wanted to know me—and she didn’t. I was hoping to talk to her before talking to you, but, well...”

She doesn’t finish the sentence. My brain throbs inside my skull. I look at Silas, a hot sear of pain, and quickly away. “How did you—why are you here?”

Sadie looks at Silas. I know, even before he speaks, that what he says is going to wreck me.

“When Camilla offered the tour jobs to American, I—” He stops, swallows. Steadies himself. “I thought it would be good for Sadie to get closure. To meet her biological—”

“You did this?” My voice comes out hoarse. This summer bleeds behind my eyes: that back alley in LA, when I thought Silas and I were strangers but he knew exactly who I was. The doctors Sadie introduced me to, not because she saw promise in me but because—what, we’re related? And the way Silas and Sadie must have compared notes at every stop along the way. Poring over that book together, talking about me and my mother and the specimens of us that they came here to study.

I take another step back from him, toward the door. My voice is low and broken. “You knew, and you kept it from me all this time.”

I watch Silas’s face fall. “Audrey, please.” He reaches for me, and I shrink away. “Please don’t look at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like you don’t recognize me.”

Tears blur my vision, hot and sharp. I think of the person Silas encouraged me to become, one little bit at a time. The studying I didn’t do, and the shadowing position I didn’t get, and the boyfriend I made plans with who’s gone now. “I let you ruin my life and you weren’t even honest with me.”

“Is that what I did?” Silas’s voice catches. “Ruined your life?”

Ruinisn’t quite right, but I nod anyways. Silas didn’t ruin me; he betrayed me by turning out to be the same as everyone else. I’d thought, for maybe the first time in my life, that I’d found someone who actually sees me. But Silas was interested in Camilla, not in me. He wanted to be around me because of something she did. Just like always, just like every other person.

I let him in like a fool, and he hid the truth from me all summer long. I trusted Sadie. I thought I might actually have a shot at a relationship with my mom.

I’ve always known I’m not the someday daughter, that she doesn’t exist the way the world believes her to. That even if she did, we were never one and the same. But this summer—with Silas and Sadie and my mom—I started to believe.

I shouldn’t be surprised now, but I am. Standing here in this musty Sunday-school room with two people I thought I knew.

Silas didn’t ruin my life; he gave me hope. I was better off without it.

I have myself to blame, really. The Audrey I was back in June would never have let herself be hurt like this, by these people. She’d never have let Camilla St. Vrain worm her way in. She’d never have fallen for the slobber-collared boy with no solid plans. But I let my guard down, and now I’m here: an idiot of my own creation.

I leave the Boston show in a rideshare by myself, shouldering past Mick and Cleo while Silas shouts after me down the hallway. I gather my things at the hotel and check myself into a different one, using the emergency credit card Dad gave me when I turned sixteen. When he calls me after midnight to say my mom’s in a panic, I tell him to tell her that I’m safe and to leave me alone. Exactly how I should have been all this time.

He presses for the name of my hotel, my room number, the reason I’m upset. But I know he’ll only tell her, and I don’t want her anywhere near me. I’ve spent my life furious with Camilla for building her fame off our fictional relationship—I don’t even know how to name what it feels like for her to have built her fame off pure fiction. If what Sadie’s saying is true, Camilla didn’t just embellish our mother-daughter relationship for her career. She lied about which daughter her career was built on in the first place. I’m more expendable to her than I could ever have imagined.

By the time morning comes, Silas has left me six voicemails. I delete all of them, one by one, without listening to them. I can’t deal with him, not when everything else is falling apart. This betrayal isn’t his—it’s my mother’s. But he’s twisted in it like a bug in a web, collateral damage. He could have told me, but now he’ll be devoured by my anger along with everything else.

When I text Sadie that I don’t want to see her at the internist visit, that I’m going alone or not at all, she gives in without a fight. I think of her in Nashville: Take your time.

I call United and cancel my flight to DC. This will be my last doctor visit, and only because it’s the one I’ve looked forward to most. I’ve given more than enough of myself to this tour, and there’s no reason for me to see it through now. Tomorrow I’ll fly to Baltimore a week early. Stay at a hotel until my dorm opens for move-in.

By the time I emerge from the T at Massachusetts General Hospital, Silas has called four more times. I put my phone on silent, straighten my blazer, walk through the hospital’s sliding glass doors. I zip every awful feeling into the shell of myself. I do what I’m best at.

When I walk back through the doors two hours later, my mother is waiting for me on the sidewalk.