Between Now and Heartbreak - Dylan Allen Page 0,94

away like a cornered animal.

“Of course it is.” I hurl the words with confidence that is entirely feigned. Inside, I feel as if a fundamental piece of myself has gone rogue and is trying to destroy me. I close my eyes against a surge of dizziness.

“Oh, it’s not a lie,” Duke says with the voice of a man who is enjoying his enemies’ bloody defeat.

“You have no proof.” There’s a tremor in my father’s voice. He looks like he aged a thousand years in just a few minutes.

His face is one of a man defeated.

Phil walks up to him.

“Carter Bosh is my brother. Your son. And now, all of your chickens have come home to roost.”

As the implications of what he’s saying start to sink in, my legs give way. I sit in the chair I’ve been using for support and press one of the linens to my mouth.

And then, I start to scream.

This scream is an apocalypse - full of anguish and rage and disgust. I shudder as it washes over me, burning me from the inside out. The napkin the only thing standing between the flames of my anguish and the annihilation of everything around me. It uses all of my oxygen and in seconds I’m light-headed. I hear the sound of my name being called, but it’s very far away.

Carter is my father’s son.

Carter is my brother.

I am no dragon.

I am a fool.

And I am ruined.

38

NOT REAL

NOT REAL

CARTER

“Ten minutes away.”

Beth’s text flashes on my phone and I immediately start to panic. My palms are sweaty, trepidation thunders through me like an out of control locomotive and my heart drums like it’s tied to the tracks.

I am not ready for this conversation.

Or any conversation. I’m sleep deprived, starving, thirsty and in a fucking dangerous mood. The last few days have been an endless, unmaking nightmare. The unbearable suspense has made sleep impossible.

That Andrew Wolfe is not lying is a reality that I find incomprehensible.

I have refused to let myself believe it.

It was just…it couldn’t be. Beth, the woman I love, the woman I want, can’t be my sister. We would know…I would feel it.

Wouldn’t I?

There has to be some biological switch that would have prevented this.

My biological mother is a murderer. Who’s to say she’s not also a liar?

They kept me in one of their holding cells overnight after the fight at her father’s party. That had been the first, in a string of sleepless nights. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw Beth’s father yank her hard enough to make her lose her footing. The image haunted me nearly as much as my own helplessness had.

But if I’d known what hell was waiting for me when I got out the next morning, I would have handcuffed myself to the bars and refused to leave.

Now, it all feels like a blur.

The bombshells from Phil and Drew Wolfe.

The disorienting acceptance of it by everyone as the truth. The ravaged expression on Beth’s face.

I recognized all of that because I’d felt it before. That same terror and horror when you find out the things that are most essential to your sense of self are all complete fabrications.

It’s how I felt the day I found out I was adopted.

I wasn’t upset at all by the fact that I was adopted.

About twenty percent of the kids in my school in Brooklyn were adopted. Some from countries that made it patently obvious that their parents were not biologically related. Some you wouldn’t have known to look at them. Over the course of my childhood, several of them were my best friends and it wasn’t a big deal. Family was family. It was just a biographical fact.

It was this that made my parents secrecy so hard to understand. If there was nothing wrong with me, why didn’t they tell me sooner?

I spent weeks spaced the fuck out. I couldn’t think. Everything I thought about my life was a lie.

So I understood Beth’s devastation as she sat silently, staring at us, while we made arrangements for our DNA tests.

Me and her father.

Me and Phil.

But what I didn’t understand was the way she flinched when I put a hand out to touch her when I was leaving. And how she’s kept her distance in the days since. I haven’t seen her once.

And I’ve been in hell.

We didn’t go to church growing up. My parents call themselves reformed Catholics. The odd “love thy brother” or “let ye who is without sin cast the first stone,” was