Chapter 423 P.M.—The Button Manor
He was my real father.
Perdita had felt the enormous burden of those words every single day since she’d discovered the truth, but never more so than now.
They were all looking at her with shattered expressions. Fola’s was the worst. Perdita had never seen her sister look so … unguarded.
She had to say something. Her siblings deserved an explanation.
“Just over a year ago, I was working on an art portfolio about origins and I started to become curious about my birth parents. I only knew what Father had told me about them, which was that my biological mother and father were from Vietnam, that they were young students who had moved to study in Prague, where they fell pregnant. Unable to support me financially, they had left me in a local orphanage, where Father then found me. Because of my project, I decided to take a DNA test … but my results were nothing like I thought they would be.” Perdita avoided her siblings’ quiet, thoughtful gazes.
“While my maternal side was as expected, showing East and Southeast Asian ancestry, the paternal side was … peculiar. It was all European. I thought it strange that Father had omitted that part about my history. Or I thought maybe he didn’t know.
But then I remembered a phrase he used to tell me growing up.
In the strangest voice, he’d tell me that I was a Button through and through,” she said wistfully.
“Other times,” she continued, looking up at the looming Manor in front of them, “he’d tell me that I would be his lasting legacy, which I didn’t think much of either.
I assumed he said weird crap like that to all of us.
Anyway, I don’t know what compelled me after I remembered those things, but something in me stirred at this new information about my birth parents, the same something that told me to get DNA from Father …
to see what came up. I couldn’t do it alone, and I didn’t want to drag you guys into this, and so Thorin helped me …
is still helping me. I’ve known him for several years.
He’s my … very good friend.” Her voice faltered.
Even now she couldn’t admit to the entirety of their relationship.
Not when it felt like her father was still watching, still disapproving, even from beyond the veil.
She cleared her throat. “I know you guys don’t trust Thorin because of who his father is, but I know him well and he’s the one who helped me arrange it all in private.
I wouldn’t have been able to go through with it all without him.
I honestly thought I was probably losing my mind by even considering it in the first place …
But something told me that this would be important.
And still, I never expected the results.
I never expected to learn that there was a 99.
9 percent chance of him being my biological father.
” Perdita’s voice had started to tremble.
Before, it had felt as though something were plugging her words, preventing her from telling her siblings the truth, but now water spilled from the dam, unrelenting, unyielding.
“This revelation led to further revelations over the course of the past year. As you know, I’ve been in the Czech Republic for work …
but it wasn’t just for work. I was there to find my birth mother, figure out the truth.
How any of this was possible. Thorin helped me secretly track down the orphanage, and that’s where the first threads in the fucked-up cloth that is our lives began to unravel.
My birth mother wasn’t a student in Prague like Father had told me, and she didn’t leave me in an orphanage there either.
She wasn’t even a student at all. She was a nineteen-year-old refugee from Vietnam who had escaped a harsh life.
Father happened to be in Prague on business at the time and decided while he was there that he wanted to expand his prodigy regime to more than just adoption.
He’d started this entire experiment to prove that nurture was greater than nature, but it seemed he wanted to explore the very opposite too.
He needed to see the impact that nature did have on genius.
One experiment wasn’t enough, no. He wanted to see if his genius could be passed down through his own biological offspring.
So he put out an ad, which my birth mother saw.
She hadn’t yet found her feet in Prague and needed money and shelter.
My guess, from all the things I gathered about her, was that she didn’t know what my father’s plans entailed …
or maybe she did, but she was vulnerable and desperate.
I can’t see a person who wasn’t desperate agreeing to any of this. ”
Perdita wiped her eyes angrily. She was going to finish telling this story, even if it killed her.
“I returned in secret to New York a few weeks ago, just for a few days. I came by the Manor when I knew Father would be away on business and I told Henry I’d left something important in Father’s office, so he let me in.
In Eden, I started looking for evidence, any records he might have kept that would corroborate what I already knew and help me further understand everything I’d found.
Eventually, I came across Father’s notes on it all, confirming so much of what I had already suspected.
My birth mother had become pregnant via in vitro fertilization and he had kept her in a lab of sorts for the term of the pregnancy, doing experiments on her, controlling when she ate and how much, not allowing her out of his sight at all in order to control the results.
As far as I can work out from the medical notes Dr. Benson made during the term of her pregnancy, the tests put such a physical and mental strain on her that she became very ill, and I was delivered early.
She passed away during childbirth. Her cause of death isn’t specified anywhere, but from all Father’s entries, it was clear that he was pushing her past her limits.
Again, it’s all a guess. I survived, meaning Father had already taken what he needed from her, and the experiment had succeeded in its first stages.
The final test would be turning me into a prodigy, which I guess he did.
I’ve spent all year trying to piece together who my birth mom was before Father got to her and where she came from, but …
I don’t think I’ll ever have the full story. ”
There was silence.
Bilal stared at the ground, processing, while Fola’s expression was unreadable now. As was Octavius’s, since the sunglasses he was wearing were obscuring much of his face. Romeo was standing next to Perdita, chewing his lip nervously.
The siblings had all been told the story of their births and their adoptions long ago.
Of how their father had found them all in different orphanages across the world, adopting them for his experimentation.
They’d been told that their birth mothers had been women trapped in circumstances that meant they could not raise the children they had birthed.
Perdita’s truth had ripped this belief to shreds.
The cruel nature of their father was not a revelation.
It was how he’d molded them into who they were today, with a ruthless, heavy hand.
Still, it was hard to process the fact that someone, Perdita’s mother, his first experiment, had died because of him.
Their murdered father was himself a murderer.
That was the most shocking revelation of all.
It went beyond what they knew him to be capable of.
“I wonder what else Father was lying about?” Bilal muttered, mostly to himself.
“As far as I could tell from his notes, my birth mom was the only one he did this to. For the rest of us, he really did seek us out in orphanages.”
“So … this is why you got the largest inheritance,” Fola said finally, her voice void of emotion. “Because you’re his real daughter, and the rest of us are counterfeit chess pieces. Fabulous.” Perdita could see all the hurt on Fola’s face, like an open bloody wound.
“We’re all his real children, Fola. Just because we’re adopted doesn’t make any of us less real.
The tabloids say terrible, untruthful things all the time.
Even Father, in his own sick way, raised us to be his children.
Regardless of whose blood is flowing through us, we are Buttons,” Perdita said, but Fola did not look any less wounded.
“I know I sound like a hypocrite, but I didn’t want any of this.
I told him last night when he told me about the inheritance—”
“You knew about the inheritance before he died?” Fola’s vulnerable expression was gone in an instant, replaced once more with a vicious mask.
Perdita shook her head, eyes widening. “I swear I only found out about the inheritance last night. He told me when I went to confront him about my birth mother. Thorin had just informed me about the results of the paternity test and I honestly couldn’t wait until after the ball to confront him.
I just wanted him to know that I knew who he was.
Who I was. It was there on the yacht that I warned him of my plans to expose what he did, show the world who he really is.
What he’s done. To vulnerable women. To us.
I told him that I would no longer parade around his stupid balls, promoting his twisted methods.
That I was done. He didn’t seem scared by my threats, not in the slightest. Instead, he seemed happy that I knew and said that he’d planned to tell me the truth when I turned eighteen next year.
Then told me all about the inheritance, about how I was his …
his true heir. It was like he expected me to be grateful to him for sharing his blood with me.
I wish I didn’t have the inheritance or his blood. It’s poison.”