Chapter Forty
Rocky
I have a front row seat to the breakup of the year. I’ve positioned myself at the poolside bar; black streamers and a cocktail list of only dark-colored spirits outfit the event tonight.
“It’s a farewell of sorts,” Valentina explained to me this morning when I ran into her at the tennis courts. “The club closes the pool on October thirty-first every year, and it’s the official last night members can use it. Oh, and you must wear black.”
So they’re holding a funeral for a pool that will be risen from the dead next spring.
It’s one of the silliest excuses I’ve heard to throw a party.
But I’m not complaining that hard. The death of one annoying fake relationship happens tonight. And that’s good enough to celebrate.
This event is a favorite with caufers (still hate it). College students mingle in Gothic dresses and tuxes, and the ones wearing swimsuits soak in the heated waters, illuminated with orange lights tonight. Fog and steam skim the surface of the pool.
Since the club has been short-staffed for Halloween, Jake is swamped behind the bar, and Phoebe and Hailey are busy scrambling to take orders at a packed iron table at the end of the pool.
I wave down the second bartender, a girl with a streak of white in the front of her hair. She looks like Rogue from X-Men, and thanks to Nova’s raging hard-on for the superhero, I unfortunately have that fun fact stored in my head. I wouldn’t be surprised if he spent his teenage years jerking off to the cartoon.
I flag Lola down. She’s rarely ever bartending when I’m at the club, so I only know of her.
She stops near me. “Grey, right? I’m Lola.”
“Nice to meet you, Lola.”
“What would you like?” She splays her palms on the bar with a flirty smile.
“Margarita.”
She grabs a glass from underneath the bar. “I’ll have to put activated charcoal in it to make it black. That okay?”
“Disgusting, but I’ll survive.”
She smiles until she notices a struggling Jake Waterford as he fumbles with some sort of black vodka concoction. “Hold on...” She goes to his rescue just as Phoebe slips beside me.
“It’s a madhouse,” she says from behind the bar. “I have fifteen orders, and I can’t read half of them.” She hands me the slip of paper she wrote on.
I can’t even decipher her chicken scratch.
“I was trying to write shorthand like Hailey.”
“First mistake,” I tell her. “Never try to imitate Hailey.” It’s led many astray.
We’re both watching Jake mop up a vodka spill on the other bar, and Phoebe whispers to me, “I told Jake he could push me in the pool, but he said he’d never do that.”
I roll my eyes. Of course he wouldn’t.
Does that make me feel worse, knowing that I’ve pushed Phoebe in a pool plenty of times during cons? Maybe... I don’t know.
It doesn’t send warm fuzzies through me that Jake has lines he won’t cross that I’ve clearly vaulted over with no question or problem.
“You should push Jake in the pool,” I tell her.
“Funny.”
“Not a complete joke...” I trail off as my phone vibrates in my pocket. I take out my cell, and Chelsea urgently waves at Phoebe from across the patio.
“I’ll be back,” Phoebe tells me. She’s quick to respond to Chelsea’s SOS.
As she leaves, I glance down at my phone. It’s my brother. He should be holed up at our sister’s loft. Last we heard, Boyd didn’t reach the port and board the cruise ship as planned. For whatever reason, he didn’t accept the free vacation that Trevor paid for. Either he didn’t buy into the scam or his desire to be in Connecticut right now won out. So my brother should be spending Halloween eating the remaining fun-sized candy and keeping the door locked.
“No trick-or-treaters,” I told him before I left. “Promise me. Don’t answer the fucking door. The only people allowed inside are the ones with keys.”
“I promise, Rocky,” he said.
I didn’t believe him.
There was a look in his eye, and I knew he was lying to me. But I left him anyway. Because he’s nineteen, and what am I supposed to do? Babysit him all night? He’s not a kid anymore... but he is my little brother.
Dread seeps into me just seeing his number on my phone.
“Hey?” I answer quickly.
“Rock...”
I’m on my feet in seconds flat, slipping my arms through my leather jacket—and I speak low into my phone. “Grab the gun on the bookshelf.”
“I’m not... there.” His voice sounds choked.
He’s not at the loft. Fucking Christ. I push through college students and older club members.
“Grey!”
“Hey, Grey!”
Their voices recede the second they see me tearing out of the patio and to the parking lot. I climb in my McLaren and start the engine. “Where are you, Trev?” I don’t leave yet. If he’s somewhere closer to the loft, parking will be a nightmare tonight and it’ll be faster for me to walk.
“Trevor?”
“...help, Rock.” His fractured voice is one full of fear. An emotion I’ve never heard from my brother. In my entire life. He’d fallen from a tree when he was eight and stared at a bone poking from his calf. He didn’t even cry.
“Where are you?” I almost shout, fisting my phone against my ear.
He doesn’t say anything, but my phone beeps and I check it quickly. He sent me his location via pin drop. My pulse skyrockets. We don’t send our locations like this.
He’s close.
Abandoning my car at the country club, I start into a sprint. Cold October wind whips against my face, and as I run, I check the map on my phone to ensure he hasn’t moved. He’s still there. The town’s main street is alive with late-night trick-or-treaters, mostly teens, and adults attending costume parties at the restaurants and bars. Kids in Ghostface masks from Scream whack each other with pillow sacks of candy.
Purple and green streamers tied to lampposts blow in the chilly night. Witch cackles and tiny screams echo around me, and my pulse races as fast as my feet.
“Ahghgh!” A bloody soccer player tries to scare a cheerleader as I pass.
“You’re not funny, Vincent!”
I never slow down.
Halloween remixes pump from the nightclub as I close in on a darkened alley behind the Gulp Seafood & Lounge. And I spot a crumpled figure on the cobblestones beside a dumpster.
It can’t be...
But I know it’s him.
The gray zip-up jacket, black pants, and sneakers should throw me off—so should the hockey mask—but I recognize my brother’s tall, lean frame and the dyed black hair that touches his neck. He’s dressed as Jason from Friday the 13th.
I slide onto the ground next to his body, and immediately, I pry the mask off his face. He’s shivering, his face ghostly white. Urgency pummels me, and I waste no time searching for a wound. “What’d he do?” What’d he fucking do?
His hands tremble near his abdomen, his fingers stained with blood. I finally spot his switchblade lying near his thigh and another knife I’ve never seen before.
Trevor’s teeth chatter. “He... got me once... I got him better. But he... ran.”
I can already tell he’s lost so much fucking blood, and I swiftly take off my jacket and apply pressure to his stab wound.
“I... I wanted to end it.” He gulps for breath. “I was... so tired...”
Of being followed. Of being hunted. I pocket both knives, and I send a cryptic text to the people I trust most.
We loved with a love that was more than love.
And then, I collect his mask.
Tears leak out of his eyes. “I thought... Halloween...” He takes a shallow breath. “He wouldn’t notice me coming...” He winces into another pained gulp. “No one ever notices... me.”
His eyes flutter.
“Hey, stay with me.” I grab his cheeks. “You hear me? Stay. Awake.”
He blinks hard, and fear slowly contorts his face. “I-I don’t want to die... Rock.”
“You’re not dying.” It’s the biggest lie I’ve ever told my brother, one I hope he believes. He needs a hospital. I know this. But there are a million and one reasons running through my head why I can’t take him there. Why I shouldn’t. “I have to put this back on you, all right?” I slip the mask back on his face, and I lift my brother in my arms, cradling him against my chest.
And I run.
I run down the main street carrying my slowly dying brother. Tendons scream in my legs, my lungs blistering with each short breath in the frigid night. My pulse is a jackhammer against my temple.
People are oblivious. It’s Halloween. He’s Jason. They’re either drunk or in their own celebratory world, and I’m scraping through real horror. Real terror.
Slowing at the apartment door next to Baubles & Bookends, I struggle to fish out my keys while holding Trevor.
“Grey!”
Sidney fucking Burke.
She comes up to me in a red minidress and devil horns, pulling away from her tipsy friends. “I thought you’d be at the pool party.” I’m a challenge to her, so telling her off at the Harvest Festival was temporary. Her curiosity descends to the hockey-masked boy in my arms. “Who is that? Is he okay?”
“He had too much to drink. You know how it is?” I widen my eyes. “Halloween.” I sound bitter that my night has driven me here. “You mind helping me? I’m trying to get my keys.”
“Yeah.” She begins to grin. “Which pocket?”
“Left side. Front pocket.”
I watch Sidney slip her fingers in my front pocket. Feeling around, she purposefully takes too long, and I bite back a glare when she caresses my shaft. What a fucking night.
“Find it?” I ask.
“Yeah...” Her lip quirks, and she dangles the keys.
I motion with my head to unlock the door. She does, then I let her drop the keys back in my pocket. “Thanks.”
“See you around, Grey.”
My back to her, I roll my eyes, and I slam the door shut after entering the stairwell. “Trevor?” I whisper to him.
He doesn’t answer.
“Trevor?” I’m about to drop him and check him on the stairs.
“Ughh... yeah... yeah.” He groans behind the mask. “Who was that?”
“A girl pretending to be a devil.” I carry him quickly up the flight of stairs, biceps burning, and while I’m unlocking the loft door, Nova arrives.
He bolts up the stairs and helps me carry Trevor into the loft. We place my brother on the couch, and I whip the hockey mask off his face and cup his cheek, my fingers bloodied.
Trevor winces. “Fuck...” His hands still rattle near the stab wound.
“Concentrate on staying awake, okay?” I apply pressure while Nova races into the kitchen. All I can think is, He’s not going to die. This isn’t how my brother goes out, and between Nova and me, we have enough skills to help him.
If I didn’t believe we did, I wouldn’t have risked bringing him to the loft.
“Yeah... yeah. I can do... that,” Trevor chatters, fighting consciousness.
“No hospital?” Nova asks, returning with a blue canvas trauma kit.
Trevor grimaces. “No... hospital. Just...” He shivers, and I rub his arm.
I look to Nova. “He hasn’t made a new alias yet.” I can’t be sure which IDs in his pocket are tied to what con, and if he dies because I’m trying to protect the families—it’s on me.
It’ll always and forever be on me.
He’s not dying.
I won’t let him die. I can’t let him die.
I just can’t.
Nova crouches beside me. His costume distracts me for half a second. What the hell is he wearing? Purple chest armor and a long trench coat complete what I’m guessing is an obscure superhero.
“Captain Underpants?” I ask.
His jaw tics. “Gambit. X-Men. Everyone knows him but you.”
“That’s definitely not true.” I keep pressure on my brother’s wound.
“You’re going to have to back up, Rocky.” Nova snaps on gloves from the trauma kit. We’ve all been trained in first aid, but Nova has the most experience delivering urgent care, since he was in EMS academy when he was eighteen.
I shuffle back and give Nova my position.
“I can already tell he’s gonna need a blood transfusion,” Nova says as he starts an IV in record time. “He’s lost way too much.”
Blood transfusion. I touch my wrist to my forehead, my palm bloody. I want to say that I can give him my blood, but I hesitate. “Do any of us know our blood types?”
Nova shoots me a tense look.
That’d be a no.
“Fuck,” I curse and dig out my phone and do a three-way call.
“Rocky?” Phoebe says, sounding panicked. “We got the message. Hails and I are on our way.”
“It’s Trevor?” Hailey asks since I used the bat emoji.
“I’m almost there,” Oliver says, out of breath like he’s running.
I tell them, “Whoever’s closest to a drugstore, we need a blood-typing kit. Steal it.”
“Oh my God,” Hailey mutters in the background.
“Ah, I just passed one.” Oliver breathes hard. “I got it.”
“Where’s Nova?” Phoebe asks.
“He’s with me,” I say.
“He’ll be okay, Hails,” Phoebe whispers. “You want me to drive?”
We all hang up after Oliver says he’ll be here in less than five minutes. Returning to the couch, Trevor blinks hard, his lips losing color and beginning to turn blue. “Just... sit down.” He winces. “And... play some Candy—” He coughs.
“Nova,” I say hurriedly, and I help him apply gauze on Trevor’s abdomen. While I add pressure to the gash, Nova starts to stitch the wound.
“It looks longer than it is deep,” Nova says in the quiet. “I don’t think he hit an organ.”
So much blood coats his gloves, the couch, the floor. I’m just hoping we have time for the blood transfusion—that it’s not too late.
Hope.
Belief.
It’s driven my entire life. But I manufacture belief for others. I create false hope and fake promises, and in a jarring second, I question if I’m tricking myself into believing we can help him. I’ve always trusted the confident voice in my head that whispers, I have this. Trust me. Everything. Will. Be. Okay.
My head is on a turntable. Whirling at high speeds.
Trevor trembles but stays conscious. I hold his hand in mine, using the other to stop the bleeding as Nova works on a portion of the long gash.
“Annabel Lee,” Nova says quietly while threading a needle through the wound. “Who came up with that? Do you remember?”
He’s referring to the message I texted everyone. It’s a line from an Edgar Allan Poe poem. Annabel Lee. It’s our biggest SOS signal. And we all know to meet at the safe location—which everyone already agreed would be the loft.
“Hailey did,” I say. “We were young. I can’t remember... nine or ten?”
The six of us created signals and codes outside of our parents. It’s just what we as kids did. Hide from the adults late at night with secrets of our own.
I tell him, “She felt like we all ‘loved with a love that was more than love’—she thought it was beautiful.” I watch as Trevor focuses on my voice, so I keep talking. “How the man lamented over a dead woman. I think it’s morbid.” I glance at Nova’s stitches. “Perfect for fucked situations.”
Nova fishes the needle in flesh. “We should’ve gone with the Tinrock-Graves family motto.”
“Which is?”
“?‘Believe nothing you hear, and only half of what you see.’?”
Also Poe.
The door opens with abrupt force. “I have it!” Oliver rushes inside with a blood-typing kit. He’s dressed as a pirate with a frilly white shirt and deep red vest. Panting, he rips open the box and fumbles with the contents.
“Give me the directions.” I hold out a hand.
“I’ll read them. Your hands are bloody, man.” Just as he says it, Hailey and Phoebe storm into the loft, the door banging loudly behind them.
“Is he...? Oh my...” Hailey careens backward.
“I’m... fine,” Trevor says, no longer shivering. His eyes are heavy-lidded and try to close. “Fine... it’s fine...”
Phoebe searches through the trauma kit and snaps on gloves, and our gazes slam together with so much emotion that my throat swells closed.
“I’ll take over, Rocky,” she says. “You do the blood transfusion.”
Nova looks to his sister. “We don’t know their blood types yet.”
“He’s probably a match,” she refutes. “Or Hailey is.”
I back away and let Phoebe press on the gauze.
“Hailey.” Oliver hands her the contents of the kit, and while Oliver reads the directions out loud, Hailey and I follow the instructions. I wash Trevor’s blood off my hands in the kitchen sink, and then my sister and I both prick our fingers and drip blood onto the card.
Phoebe uses a pipet from the trauma bag to suction drops of Trevor’s blood for the test.
Oliver reaches the bottom of the directions and shifts his weight.
“What is it?” I ask him.
“It’ll take ten minutes.”
“Just give him my blood,” Hailey says, not thinking this through.
“We don’t know our blood types, Hails,” I interject. “We don’t even know Mom’s—”
“She’s O negative,” Hailey says. “She told me.”
To your face?
My doubt reeks like five-week-old garbage, but I’m not releasing the stench in the room. They likely already smell it on me.
Especially as Hailey feels the need to clarify. “She was telling me a story about how she used to donate blood a lot when she was young. Before this whole lifestyle became her everything. She’s a universal donor.”
Believe nothing you hear, and only half of what you see.
I’m not thinking straight.
Everything is muddled as hell in my brain.
Where’s the lie?
There is no lie. They wouldn’t tell us our blood types because they’d have no reason to. Just like we have no social security cards, no identification that could incriminate us.
Or incriminate them...
Am I lying to myself?
There is no lie.
What do I want to believe? What do I want to see?
And is what I want even the actual truth?
I sit on the coffee table. Waiting for the timer to buzz. Lost in a pool of belief and disbelief.
Oliver turns to my sister. “Hails, if your mom is O negative, then he could be O negative, too. And then that means...?” He finds the answer in his head. “He can only receive O negative?”
“Yeah.” She rips open another kit. “You, Nova, and Phoebe should also do a test in case you match him.”
The triplets prick their fingers.
Ten minutes.
Turns to five minutes.
Turns to two minutes.
“Trevor.” I snap my fingers, his eyes drooping.
“Still... here.” He’s drifting.
The timer vibrates my phone. I check my kit. “I’m B negative. Shit,” I curse.
Hailey examines her results. “I’m O negative.” The universal donor. Thank God. Quickly, we push the coffee table closer to the couch, and Hailey lies on the surface while Nova taps her vein and starts an IV line.
We don’t need to check Trevor’s blood type, but it’s nagging me.
The doubt.
The unknown. I eye the results on the ground near Phoebe and the trauma bag.
Don’t look. I shouldn’t look. I should be like every mark and just live with rose-colored glasses. Seeing exactly what I want to see.
I’ve never wanted that to be me.
Right as I go toward my brother’s results, a timer beeps on Oliver’s phone. The triplets. Their tests are done.
Oliver checks them on the kitchen counter. He says nothing.
He’s not shocked by whatever he sees. He just moves away from the bar and watches blood flow through the narrow tube out of Hailey’s arm and into Trevor.
“What are yours?” I ask him.
“All A positive.”
Okay.
Okay.
I can’t trust myself right now. Our parents haven’t been tricking us—maybe they never have been. Maybe I’ve been wrong. This entire time.
I’ve just hated my father, and that resentment piled so high inside of me that I couldn’t see beyond the mound of hatred.
I saw what I wanted to see.
I’m just the cynic. The pessimist. I’m made to disbelieve.
With a deep breath, I comb a hand through my hair and try to focus on the dull throb of my finger that I pricked.
Phoebe sees Trevor’s results near her knee, and she picks them up. Glancing at them, she says, “He’s AB negative.”
Hailey props herself up on her elbows and peers at the test in Phoebe’s hands. “Run it again.”
I go still.
“Why?” Oliver asks.
“Th-that has to be Boyd’s blood,” Hailey stammers. “Run it again.”
Tension slips through the room like a coiled snake. No one argues, and Phoebe pricks Trevor’s finger this time instead of pipetting blood around his wound.
While we wait, I ask quietly, “What does it mean, Hailey?”
Blood slips out of the IV that Nova hooked on a coatrack—his makeshift medical IV pole. Oliver wedges a pillow under her head, but she’s staring dazed at the ceiling.
“It doesn’t mean anything,” she breathes shakily, “because it can’t be right.”
“But if it is right?” Phoebe asks. “What does it mean?”
“It’s impossible for someone who’s O negative to have a child who is AB negative,” Hailey whispers like she’s reading a fact she remembers from a book she read ten years go. “If the test is right, Trevor isn’t Mom’s kid.”
I don’t know what to think anymore.
The air hums with a heavy current. My first feeling isn’t even surprise. Dread is covered in remorse and uncertainty.
“It’s wrong,” Nova says. “The test is wrong. There’s a lot of blood here. It’s contaminated.”
“Phoebe just pricked his finger,” Oliver tells his brother. “She didn’t take it from the opened wound. We’ll just wait.”
We wait.
No one says anything except to ask Trevor how he’s feeling. He’s in and out of consciousness. I keep my fingers on his pulse.
“He’ll be okay,” I tell Hailey.
She’s so pale, and it’s not from the lack of blood. It’s like she’s seen a monster.
Oliver’s phone rings shrilly, and Phoebe jolts. “Fuck.”
He shuts off the timer, and Hailey crunches upward to check the test. As soon as she sees it, she buries her anguished face in her palm. A pained noise like a fisted sob comes out of her.
Phoebe looks. “It’s AB negative.”
“No kidding,” Oliver says with a short breath. “I just thought she looked gutted because we’re out of candy kisses.” His eyes flash to me.
Phoebe turns to me.
Like they’ll expect me to chime in and say, I told you so.
But if Trevor isn’t Addison’s son, then this is deceit on another level. I almost... I almost can’t believe it, and that scares me, too. There is actual proof sitting in front of us. So that means, regardless of my aversion toward our parents, I don’t want to believe that my brother isn’t my brother.
I don’t want to believe that our parents could’ve done worse than what I imagined.
I don’t want to believe my entire life could be a sham.
I’ve been fooled.
We’ve been fooled.
“She was pregnant,” Nova tells everyone. “We all saw Addison pregnant.”
That’s true. I have memories of my mom with a big, round belly. I was six at the time. They were all five.
Are those even our real ages?
My stomach churns, and Oliver says what I’m also thinking: “Did any of us see Addison’s bare stomach? No shirt covering her belly.”
“How would any of us remember that?” Nova questions. “We were five.”
Hailey is lying flat on the table, her hands pressed to her face. If she remembers, the answer is she never saw.
“She could’ve been pretending,” Phoebe says, her brows bunching with the pain of this theory.
“Pretending to be pregnant?” Nova says with traces of skepticism.
Oliver is wincing. “She could’ve faked her pregnancy with a fake belly that both Hailey and Phoebe have worn before, and she did it to convince all of us that Trevor was hers. How is that not in the realm of possibility, Nova? We’ve all pulled bigger cons than that.”
Silence.
“When have they ever pulled a con on us?” Nova questions all of us.
It sits in the room for a long minute.
Until I whisper, “From birth.”
Oliver starts laughing, his face twisting. “This is classic... a classic. They wanted another little child with little hands when we got too old, so he could be the cute little innocent kid, and so they what—steal Trevor?”
My brother’s pulse thumps beneath my fingers.
Trevor has a similar eye color to mine and Hailey’s. Except flecks of blue lie inside his grays. And Hailey—does she even look like me? She has a thin nose, one that our mom said she got from Grandma Nellie.
A grandma we’ve never met.
I grit harder, my jaw clenching.
“What about us?” Phoebe asks her brothers. “We’re triplets. You can’t fake that.”
It’s also true—they’re very clearly related, even being fraternal.
Hailey drops her hands, her cheeks blotchy with mascara. “You’d be good shills. The perfect shills.” Her voice carries a tremor. “If the three of you look undeniably related, none of us would ever question our parentage.”
Oliver freezes in place. “Rocky wasn’t old enough to remember our mom being pregnant.”
“How convenient,” I mutter.
“What if they’re not our mothers?” Oliver questions with outstretched arms. “What if they’re not our fathers?” He’s saying what everyone is contemplating. Not one looks surprised by his declaration.
“There are no pictures,” Phoebe realizes. “There are no pictures of any pregnancies. Not Addison with Rocky. Not Addison with Hailey. Not Elizabeth with us.”
“They couldn’t incriminate themselves,” Hailey says quietly. “That’s what they always told us... but is that even the truth?” She looks to me. “Rocky?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know.”
That’s my truth.
I have no fucking clue.
Nova finally stands up from beside Trevor. “Would they even tell us the truth if we asked?”
“No,” most of us say.
“That’s what I thought.” Nova sighs out and drags his gaze, snapping gloves off his hands. He catches my eyes, holding for an extended beat.
We’ve been on opposite sides for so long—clashing when it comes to our mothers, my father—and I never thought he’d question them, not for anything.
I was wrong.
“?‘Believe nothing you hear, and only half of what you see.’?” Nova nods to me.
I nod back to him. “Should I stop calling you Winchester?”
“No.” He disposes of the gloves. “Only because Dean is the cool one.”
I let out a short laugh.
“Your brother is going to make it, by the way.” He pauses, as though considering what he called him. “Trevor, your...”
“He’s still my brother.” Fury begins brewing again. Toward our parents. “He’ll always be my brother.” I don’t care what they did.
That’s going to stay true.
“What do we know?” Phoebe wonders. “Like, what do we know as fact?”
Hailey is the one who says, “Trevor isn’t related to Addison. That’s it.”
“That’s not all,” Nova says, zipping up the trauma bag. “We know that we can only trust everyone in this room.”
For the first time, I’m not alone in this.