Pike (The Pawn Duet #1) - T.M. Frazier Page 0,71

as propaganda of the Fourth Reich. There’s a picture of a much younger Darius with another man whose eyes are the same grey shade as mine.

I gasp and feel my face pale. No, this can’t be true. It can’t be. I jerk my hand from Pike’s and walk over to the window.

“What?” Pike growls at Nine.

I can feel Pike’s eyes on me as Nine answers. “This is from over thirty years ago, not twenty. Mickey’s father wasn’t undercover in the Fourth Reich.” Nine taps on the screen. “He was a founding member.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

Mickey

I find Thorne in the office.

Pike and Nine are upstairs huddled together to make sense of this mess I made, and I couldn’t stand it any longer. I was choking on my own sadness and guilt.

I know they told Thorne everything because I’d heard them downstairs. The look Thorne gives me when I enter isn’t one of hatred or pity but sympathy.

“I’m curious,” she says. “How does that photographic memory thing of yours work?”

I’m grateful for the question, any question about anything other than about my current situation. I answer immediately. “Think of it this way: if you read a page in a book, you see black letters on a white page. I may know it’s black letters on a white page, but I interpret them as white letters surrounding them in black. It’s how my brain is able to process more than one thing at once.”

She shrugs. “Guess you never had to study much.”

I twist my lips and think. “Yes, and no. I can take a quick glance at the text book and memorize the answers, but to truly learn something and know it without having to revert to that particular memory, I have to read it a few times, just like everyone else, and in that way, yeah, I still have to study. There’s a big difference between knowing something and truly understanding the meaning behind it.”

“Is there a downside?” she asks.

Only remembering everything you never wanted to remember in vivid fucking detail. “Several. Sometimes, I have a hard time following conversation. Things get cluttered in my brain. Let’s say my parents started talking about going back to a restaurant we went to last summer on our vacation. Well, my brain automatically opens the album under the file for that restaurant, and I lose the rest of what they’re saying because I’m too busy remembering how the waiter had a patch of hair under his ear by his jawline he missed while shaving, or how the awning has a tear on the left side under the letter A in the restaurant’s name, or how the bathroom stall had an advertisement on the door for an entirely different establishment selling the same kind of food, and then I’m reciting the phone number of the competition out loud, and when I’m done, I come to and my parents and sisters are all staring at me, waiting for me to come back to earth and out of my own junkyard of a brain.”

“How do you deal with it?” she asks, seemingly genuinely interested.

“How does anyone deal with anything?” I reply, looking to the fluorescent lights on the ceiling as the buzz to life.

“Generator must have kicked in,” Thorne says. “Keep going.”

“I don’t, really. I just live. I believe that it’s a gift for the most part and it makes me, well… me.”

For a moment, I wander around the office while Thorne works. This could be the last time I see her, and something about her has been marinating in my brain.

“When are you going to tell Pike?” I ask, shoving my hands into my back pockets.

“Tell him what?” She snaps her eyes to mine.

“That you’re his sister.”

Her jaw drops. “How…how did you know?” She rubs the birthmark behind her ear.

I smile. “You mean from besides the fact that you both make the same expression when you’re worried about something but trying not to look like you’re worried?” I ask. “Or the moon shaped birthmark you both have behind your left ears?”

She realizes what she’s doing and stops.

“Why haven’t you told him?” I press.

Thorne sighs, mindlessly swiveling in her chair. “You know how he is. He isn’t into family. When I found out about him, I came to tell him, and when I started talking about family to lead up to telling him, he told me that family meant nothing to him. That it’s a bullshit pretend bond people lean on to make excuses for their lives. He really didn’t