Betrayed by My Childhood Love novel · Chapter 16 of 32

Chapter 16: Annika on the Porch

I didn't get up off the swing.

Annika stood at the bottom of the steps and held her phone up at me, screen first.

The photo of the angry girl at fifteen glowed in the dark.

"What is this?"

"You know what it is."

"You sent me a picture of a dead woman at eleven at night, two weeks before the hearing." Her voice cracked high. "Do you know what that is? That's sick. That's a sick, cheap trick."

"It's your mother."

"My mother is in Dallas asleep."

"Then why are you here?"

She came up two steps.

"Because you don't get to do this. You don't get to take everything and then send me a picture like you're being nice."

"I didn't take anything."

"You took all of it!"

It came out of her like a scream.

Down the road a dog started barking.

"Five years," she said. "Five years since you showed up in our kitchen with your stupid duffel bag, and nothing has been mine since. Mom cried for a month. Dad started asking about your grades at dinner. My grades. Mine. And he asked about yours."

"I never asked him to."

"You didn't have to!" She was crying now, hard and ugly, nothing like the pretty tears she used at parties. "And Lyndon used to look at you over that kitchen island like you hung the moon. And then you got Rice, and then you got your little video, and now my own team looks at me sideways every time somebody says the word swirl."

"Because you can't explain it."

"Because you made sure I couldn't!"

"I was twelve," I said. "I drew it in a garage. You stole it out of the same garage. Nobody made you do that."

She stared at me with her chin out.

Her mother's chin.

"They were going to send me back," she said, suddenly quiet. "Did you know that? When the test came. I heard them in the study. Dad said maybe I'd be happier with my real family. With her." She pointed at the house behind me. "Mom said absolutely not, and that settled it. And then I spent five years making sure she never changed her mind."

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