---

After I found out I had a son, and then all the crazy that came after it, I missed the final few weeks of school last term. It took some deep thinking and a few long talks with Brett, but I finally decided, as the fourth term began for the year, that I needed to go back to school. I needed a life outside of my new-old family or I’d go as insane as they all were. I was still a child in a lot of ways, and I knew, even the child in me knew, that I needed to nurture that, or I’d feel like I was forced to grow up too quickly. I also didn’t want to resent David purely because I didn’t have a life of my own. My entire family, aside from Brett, belonged to him—favored him. Sided with him. I needed people in my life for me.

With my writing and mathematics skills up to scratch after weeks of being coached by my eight-year-old son and then by David once I finally understood the basics, I was ready for mainstream schooling. I came back to an entirely different world—changing classes and teachers and subjects every forty minutes—and found that Cal had also integrated. I thought he’d still hate me, give me the cold shoulder, but when I sat down at a desk at the back of the last class for the day, he came straight over and sat beside me.

“I heard you were back,” he said.

“And you didn’t come find me to say hello.” I was a bit cold.

“I had a detention at lunch, so I couldn’t. Sorry.”

I smiled at him. “So you’re talking to me then?”

“Yeah.” He returned my smile with a tinge of awkwardness. “Hey, I’m sorry about everything, Ara—the last time I saw you. I was just hurt and trying to make you like me by ignoring you.”

“Hm, that worked,” I scoffed.

“Yeah.” He laughed nervously, scratching a line in the desktop. “It was stupid. So?” He offered his hand. “Friends again?”

“Yeah.” I shook it. “I’d like that.”

By the end of the day, as I stood outside waiting for Brett to pick me up, my life seemed to have returned to some kind of normal. I laughed and joked with my friends as if nothing had ever changed, and they all seemed to have forgiven me for not speaking to them for the entire school holidays. I think they understood that I’d gone through something pretty tough at home, and they stayed close so I could talk if I wanted but distant enough that I didn’t feel pressured. It was very refreshing.

“Hey, Ara!” Cal ran toward me, waving back at his mom to wait. “Wanna come hang out this afternoon?”

“Raincheck?” I asked as Brett pulled up. “I gotta go shop online for wedding dresses over a long-distance call.”

Cal looked ultimately confused. “Who’s getting married?”

“My daughter,” I said, and it wasn’t until Cal looked even more confused that I realized what I’d said.

“Daughter?”

“Uh…” Shit. There was nothing to say. I messed up. Big time. But, if I was honest with myself, I think a big part of me was tired of going at this alone. I wanted a friend to talk to—outside of my immortal world and outside of my so-called family—so I was pretty sure I’d subconsciously said that deliberately. If that makes sense. “Sneak out tonight,” I said. “Come to my house once your parents go to sleep.”

“Sweet.” He winked suggestively.

“Ha-ha.” I punched him in the arm. “Not for that kind of thing.”

“I know.” He re-shouldered his bag, waving at his mom again when she beeped. “So about eleven then?”

“Yep. I’ll leave the front door unlocked.”

“Will your brother go crazy if he finds me there that late at night?”

I had to laugh. Maybe if he was my brother. And maybe if I wasn’t forty years old. “No,” I said instead. “He’s cool with it.”

“Okay. I’ll see you tonight.”

Elora pressed ‘call’ on the computer screen and grinned at me as it started ringing on the other side—thousands of miles away at a place called Loslilian, where the king and queen resided. I wasn’t nervous about talking to Elora’s ‘Aunt Lily’ until she said, “So, are you nervous about meeting your twin soul for the first time?”

Well, now I was! “Um…”

“You’ll love her,” she said. “She’s just like you, but… different.”

I laughed. “That makes so much sense.”

“You’ll see what she means,” Ali said, sitting down on my other side, all three of us leaning in to get our faces in the camera.

“So how can we shop for wedding dresses like this?” I asked.

“Easy.” Ali picked up her laptop and opened it. “I’ll search for them here, and we’ll show Lily on the camera, and we can all decide what we like.”

This just sounded too complicated. I liked the way people did it in movies better, you know, where they go to different bridal stores and try them all on—the whole laughing and joking and totally cliché deal.

The screen went white then and a thin face appeared within it, her pale skin radiant beneath kind blue eyes. I’d never seen anyone quite so beautiful, and it took my breath away in the first second. She had such slender and delicate features that I suddenly felt stocky and butch in comparison. Her almost perfectly-shaped lips and her dark hair, falling like reams of silk, made me feel bad about myself for a moment too. This was Jason’s wife. This was the Queen of the Lilithian people. And she was entirely and undoubtedly worthy of her station.

“Aunt Lily,” Elora said, “I’d like you to meet my mom…”

“Ara,” Lily said, leaning closer to the screen as if she couldn’t quite believe her eyes. “I’ve only seen you in pictures, but I have to say, you bear the family resemblance well.”

Coming from her, that was the ultimate compliment. I wanted to ask her what her accent was. I’d never really heard many accents, but I think it sounded a little French in places. It was hard to tell.

She touched her chest with long thin fingers, shaking her head. “I’ve been so looking forward to this call—to meeting you. I just… I’m overwhelmed.” She waved her hand in front of her eyes, blinking.

Thinking she couldn’t hear me, or really see me, I leaned in to Elora and whispered, “Why is she crying?”

Lily laughed. “I get emotional when I’m pregnant.”

“And Lily has known of you since she first awakened,” Elora said. “She’s been following your progress and—”

“I couldn’t wait to have a sister,” Lily said. “And even better, my sister is my twin soul—”

“Sister?” Now I was really confused. Wasn’t I more like a great-great-granddaughter or something?

“Sister-in-law.” She showed her wedding ring. “But you are a descendant of mine, which makes you family by blood also.”

I nodded. And then it occurred to me that her brother, Drake, was my father. Which, if I was correct, made me her niece and her great-great-great-granddaughter. I was a result of incest—of sorts. But that was a can of worms I just did not want to open right now.

“So, we have limited time,” Ali said, deliberately dragging the spotlight off me. “I’ve got the first store loaded up and I’ve already marked my favorites.”

As the girls all talked and cooed over dresses, I thought about what Lily had said: we were sisters by marriage. I’d never had a sister before. Okay, well I did in my past life, but she tried to kill me, so she was totally not my sister anymore. But I got the sense that Lily would make a much better sister.

When Elora ran off to get the veil she’d bought last week, the quiet moment in her absence turned into an awkward one. I was about to fill it with some random question about weddings, but Lily made it more awkward. It seemed she had a knack for that.

“I’ve seen you in some of Jason’s memories,” she said to me.

Ali shifted in her seat, clearing her throat as her eyes went wide.

“Oh,” was all I could contribute. I had no way of knowing what kinds of memories Jason had of me.

“There is a lot of pain there—for you and for my Jason. For David also.”

“Oh.”

“I do not bring this up to embarrass you or make you feel bad, I only meant to say that I’m glad to finally see you—see something other than a memory, a perception. And I’m glad also to see you smile. So tell me”—she folded her hands on her table in a businesslike manner—“have you fallen head over heels in love with our David yet?”

“You don’t know?” I said, looking sideways at Ali.

“We don’t get word about you, Ara—not often. Any information coming back to us is very filtered and one-sided. No one has told us how your relationship is progressing—”

“That’s because it isn’t,” Ali said.

Lily looked at me, surprised. “Why?”

“Why does it have to?” I spat snottily. And why do people have to attack me from all angles if I don’t love that creep?

“Do you not love him?” she asked.

“No. To be honest, I don’t.”

“I’m surprised,” she breathed. “I just thought you’d fall for him immediately.”

“So did he, apparently.” I glanced at Ali. She leaned out of the frame and showed her teeth in an apologetic grimace.

“That must have been…”—Lily looked down, her lashes long and thick, covering her eyes, until she looked up and smiled—“if David is anything like his brother, I imagine that, without loving him in return, you must have felt quite suffocated by him.”

“A little,” I said, but my smile said it all, and Lily laughed, tossing her head back.

“I wish I had been able to talk to you then—guide you through it. I hope he hasn’t done more damage to your relationship than good.”

“Not permanent damage,” I lied. “But I may have.”

“What do you mean?” Her worried eyes followed Elora as she came back in and sat down.

“I found out that he was the impure soul and I freaked out,” I said sheepishly. “I kinda planned to take Harry away so he wouldn’t be tainted by David.”

Lily clearly wasn’t sure whether to laugh or be horrified.

“He isn’t really talking to me now,” I added. “I mean, aside from my lessons.”

“Lessons?”

“He tutors me, but outside of that—like, when Harry’s not around—he gives me the cold shoulder.”

“Then maybe there’s more to it than just the Harry thing.”

“Like what?”

“I’m not entirely sure, but I am sure there must be,” Lily said. “David isn’t one to hold a grudge.”

All three of us girls on this side of the world laughed loudly.

“I take it my statement is incorrect,” Lily said with a gentle laugh. “Should I have his brother talk to him?”

“No,” we all said, wide-eyed.

“Jason needs to stay completely out of this.” Elora lowered her voice then, checking over her shoulder when we heard a squeak in the floorboard upstairs. “Dad’s mad at him for making decisions about his wife—”

“Jason was right, though,” I said. “If someone had brought me here and sat me down in front of David, told me I was married to him and had kids with him, I would have bolted!”

“Really?” Lily said, exchanging a strange glance with Elora, and I got the sense that she wasn’t all that shocked by my statement.

“Yeah,” I added anyway, playing dumb, “I mean, I didn’t know him then—didn’t have any feelings for him—”

“Feelings? You have feelings for him?” she asked, and Ali and Elora turned to me, intrigued.

I shook my head. “I care for him, but not in the way he wants me to.”

No one said anything then, and once again I felt bad—excluded, I guess, as if they would one day just ask me to leave altogether if I couldn’t love David. I wanted to tell them that he was mean, that he made me cry, tried to control me, yelled at me when I didn’t like foods or songs I used to like, but they wouldn’t believe me. He had been placed on a pedestal in this family and I knew they’d call me a liar.

“Anyway.” Elora held her veil up to the camera. “This is it.”

“Oooh, I love it!” Lily trilled, and as we talked some more about dresses and put about a hundred in the Maybe Basket and a thousand in the No Basket, I had to pretend most of the time to smile. I felt heavy, and I couldn’t wait to tell Cal tonight about my life. Couldn’t wait to have someone on my side.