The anger. The anger I could deal with. I relished when the anger came, like an old friend I hadn’t spoken to in years but always seemed to find their way in my life. With the anger came the drinking, and in the past, the sex. I’d lost count as to how many times I’d picked up my phone to look for one of the apps I’d used for hooking up. Every single time, I thought of Adam, and I set it down. He’d allowed me to lose myself in him, but afterward, when I picked myself up and recoiled, the way I had in the past, with strangers, I could see the pain in his eyes. It was something I hadn’t experienced with those other guys, since they didn’t care about me the way Adam did. Seeing his pain was like inflicting it on myself, so I stopped using sex as a way to channel my anger and was on the path to learning to accept the love that came with it and him.
There was no bargaining in my grief. I knew it wouldn’t get me anywhere. I had nothing to bargain with.
The acceptance wasn’t coming at all. I just . . . I’d been looking for blood relatives for too long to just accept this loss.
It had been a week since the Manor Murders, as the members of The Eight were now calling it. It would have been a great headline in a paper, except, it wasn’t publicized. Even with the police being there and breaking things up. Even with the paramedics who were called. Even with all of the recorded evidence of wrongdoing, nobody outside of the residence knew what happened. It was as if Wendy had been a ghost. As if everyone killed that day had been insignificant in life and now in death. It hurt.
Neil and Debbie had both been arrested, but were out on bail. We had enough videos to put them behind bars, but because they’d been acquired by hacking into their server, they may not hold up in court. This was how I found myself walking into The Institute. After meeting with The Swords and The Eight, my memory was refreshed on what happened last year, when Amelia Bastón’s father had been arrested for murdering a girl. He’d been arrested and acquitted. Innocent men were placed behind bars and guilty ones walked every single day. I wasn’t going to leave any of this to chance. And Debbie was still here, running the show as if she had nothing to worry about. I jotted my name down on the check-in sheet and waited for them to process my arrival.
“Eva?” Debbie’s voice made me freeze.
I turned slowly. When I looked at her, I felt nothing but sadness. I should have felt anger. I would have welcomed anger, but that wasn’t how the mind worked. She’d conditioned me to see her as an ally, a source of comfort, and so my treacherous emotions were at odds.
“I’ll take her to her room, Candace,” Dr. Maslow said to the nurse as she walked over to me. “Come.”
I went. It was as if my feet weren’t my own.
She took me to the room I’d come to know as my own and walked me over to the seating area, which was a bench in a little nook where I was surrounded by biographies, memoirs, and early education books.
“I should have reached out weeks ago. I’m sorry,” she said. “I should have explained everything then. I’m sure you’ve heard awful things about us in the news, but you know how much they lie.”
“Were they lying about you owning St. Nicolas’ Orphanage?”
“Well, no, but to be fair, my great-great-grandfather was the owner and it fell upon us that way, otherwise we would have never sought it out.”
“Did they lie about you specifically targeting women in need? Bringing them over here and paying for their medical bills, their food, their children’s food, and then ripping the babies away from them?”
Debbie searched my eyes. I found no remorse in hers. No sign of discomfort. Nothing. My anger flared.
“Did they lie about you using my sisters and me in a study that’s lasted twenty years? Did they lie about how you recorded each interaction we had? Or how you trained us to sit here like this with you without ripping your eyes out the way we should have? Or how you turned us against our own parents because you needed us to be on your side and not theirs?” My voice was hoarse from shouting, my cheeks wet with tears, but I couldn’t seem to stop. “You tore families apart when you played God as if we were puppets for you to control and feed drugs to.”
“You needed those drugs.”
“No.” I slammed my fist against the seat. “I needed my sisters. I needed real love.”
“It wasn’t fake,” she said, her voice a whisper. “I didn’t fake anything during our time together. I love you, Eva. I love all of you.” Her eyes filled with tears.
“Wendy is dead.”
“And I’m sorry about that. It should have never happened. We should have never trusted those sick, satanic monks.” She glanced away briefly. “I am sorry. I tried to stop it years ago, once we realized there may be a link between all of your anger.”
“And why didn’t you? Why didn’t you tell us about each other?”
“By then it was too late to tell you. The damage was done and . . . ” She shook her head, wiping her face.
“And what? Your lawyers didn’t approve of you coming clean?”
“What we did was entirely legal. Your parents signed a contractual agreement with us.”
“Just because something is legal, doesn’t mean it’s ethical or morally right.” I wiped my own face with both hands. “I hate you. I hate you and Neil and I hate what you’ve done to us. I hate that I took my anger out on Karen for so many years when most of it wasn’t even her fault.”
“Karen is a drunk.”
“Because of me,” I yelled, rearing forward. “She’s a drunk because of me.”
“She’s a drunk because her mother was a drunk and her grandmother was as well. We’ve been watching her family for generations too. You think she’s exempt from this? You think she’s just a random person we chose to give you to?”
I gasped, covering my mouth and pulling away as if her words had slapped me. I wasn’t sure what was worse, that this was written in the stars before I was even a blip on their radar, or that they’d given me to a person they knew was predisposed to becoming a drunk and were okay with that. Either way, my life felt like it had been a lie. Everything was a lie.
“What about having Stella here while I was at The Manor? What the fuck was up with that?”
“That wasn’t my idea.” She looked away. “Dr. Thompson caught wind of everything and didn’t want his daughter involved with The Swords.”
“So he was involved?”
“He didn’t want either of you involved, but having you in The Manor meant his daughter wouldn’t be.”
“What are you not telling me?”
“Neil thought it would be a good idea to switch you. To tell you that you were Stella and tell her she was Eva. To see how you’d react to different socioeconomic backgrounds now that you were already developed by your own.”
“So you, what, tried to erase my memory?”
“It didn’t work. I hoped it wouldn’t.”
“I have no memory of those three days,” I screamed.
“But you remembered who you were when you were at the station. You knew there was no Chris Ryan from Tinder. You knew and you went along with it and you agreed to go to The Manor in Stella’s place. You’re not innocent in all of this. You took their money, you used Stella’s car, her clothes.”