Chapter 27 Scarlett
Scarlett
Scarlett was alone in the house. Dylan had taken Olivia to her dental appointment for braces.
Olivia wasn’t even upset about having to get them.
If it had been Scarlett, she would have been super pissed about having wires in her mouth and having to give up gum, but Olivia took it in stride like she did everything.
Sometimes Scarlett wished she was more like her sister.
But she agreed with Ben; you were born with your personality, so no sense in wishing you were someone else.
Her science teacher had done a unit on nature versus nurture, which Scarlett found fascinating.
Her teacher said the debate was still going on, with some people believing that your behavior and choices were hardwired into you, while others believed that your environment had more to do with who you became.
Scarlett decided she was in the nature camp.
She and her sister were raised in the same environment, but they were as different as night and day.
Her teacher pointed out that due to their age difference, they didn’t have the same parents.
That time would have changed them, and when Olivia came along, they may have acted differently toward her than Scarlett at the same age.
But Scarlett thought about her friends at the yacht club, Dana and Ruby, who were identical twins, yet their personalities were super different.
If genes made you who you were, then she wondered who she took after.
Definitely not her father, who was all about order and structure.
And even though she looked like her mom, her personality was nothing like hers.
Her mom was so easygoing, more like Olivia.
Scarlett didn’t think she was like Gram and Granddad, either.
She didn’t remember her grandmother on her mom’s side because she had died when Scarlett was only four.
She had a grandfather, too, but her mom wouldn’t say much about him, only that he wasn’t in her life.
So, who was she like? It bugged her and made her feel like she didn’t belong anywhere.
She walked upstairs, went into her parents’ bedroom, and opened her mother’s closet.
She sure has a lot of shoes, Scarlett thought, looking at them all lined up on shelves on one of the walls.
Everything was organized so neatly, with all Annabelle’s purses on their own shelves, and her clothes sorted by style—suits in one section, dresses in another, and blouses in their own space.
But it was nothing compared to Gram’s closet, which was twice the size of this one, and where all her handbags had their own silk bags with the designer’s name on them.
Her mom called Gram a “clotheshorse,” which Scarlett thought was a weird expression.
But she wasn’t here to look at her mom’s clothes.
She was trying to find something. She was looking for anything her mother might have held on to from the time before she was married.
Scarlett was sure there had been someone her mother loved before her father.
Because she was convinced that her mother had gotten pregnant before they were married, and she also believed that it wasn’t by the man she called “Dad.” That was why he’d been so adamantly opposed to Scarlett taking the DNA test. But what he didn’t know was that she had forged her parents’ signatures and had taken it anyway.
And now she had the proof that they were a pair of liars.