8. Liath
LIATH
Something cold moved down my back. My hand gripped the edge of the desk hard enough my knuckles ached.
No. This was a coincidence. People had faces that looked similar without any relation. Eighteen years was a long time and grainy newsprint flattened resemblances.
I forced my eyes back to the photo. It was still my face.
She died eighteen years ago.
Eighteen years ago, I was adopted.
This was her.
My birth mother.
The library seemed to drop away beneath the sudden clamor of my synesthesia, sounds crashing loudly through the back of my skull all at once until I could barely hear the heating pipes or the wind anymore.
This was how Alistair knew her. She had been a Ravenwood student.
The article blurred and snapped back into focus. Underneath the photograph sat her name.
Kathleen Daugherty.
The name took a second to land. Daugherty. It meant unlucky in Irish.
My unlucky girl. The nickname Alistair used for Rua crashed back through my head.
He had known. He had known that Rua had been Kathleen’s daughter.
I stared at Kathleen’s face on the screen. Her eyes, my eyes, looking back at me from eighteen years ago already carrying sadness around the edges. She would have been my age.
I kept reading, the article talking about Kathleen, a scholarship student who had been discovered to have had a child out of wedlock in a conservative catholic town, weaving rumors into an ugly theory.
She killed herself because of it. Because of me.
My mother drowned herself in Blackwood Lake because Ravenwood found out about me.
Heat flooded my face.
My hidden adoption paperwork came back to me and the two initials on the line where her name should have been. K.D.
She only left her initials because she had been ashamed. She hadn’t wanted to be found.
I shut down the computer and pushed back from the desk hard enough the chair wheels scraped across the floor.
I needed to get out of here.
The walk back through Ravenwood grounds passed in fragments. Cold wind cutting under my collar, dead leaves scraping across stone, black water shifting beyond the trees where Kathleen had drowned.
By the time I reached the tower staircase, my jaw was aching from how tight I had been holding it.
I stopped on the landing, halfway in my doorway. For some stupid reason I glanced up. To the level above.
To her room.
She had slept up there. Cried up there. Maybe stood at these same windows, staring out toward the lake before she walked into it.
I began climbing the stairs before I’d realized I’d started moving.
I walked up the spiral staircase, my hand skimming the rough stone wall, my skin prickling with anticipation and dread in equal measure. The stone steps were icy through my bare feet, each one a little shock that kept me moving.
The stairs ended at a landing where a single door stood.
Her bedroom.
I tried the handle. The wood had swelled in the frame from years of damp neglect, and the door held against me. I pressed my shoulder into it and pushed.
The door scraped open against the floorboards in a slow groan that seemed to fill the whole tower.
The smell hit me before anything else—old paper, damp stone, and a faint trace of something floral gone sour. The air felt thick, as if it hadn’t been disturbed in years.
At first I could just see shapes and shadows layered over each other.
I found a small lamp on a side table and turned it on. The bulb flickered once, then stayed lit.
I squinted as my vision slowly adjusted to the yellowish glow, dust motes drifting through the light like drowning stars.
The round attic room was bare except for a narrow bed, a dark wood dresser bowing in the middle, and a desk buried beneath warped books. Paintings covered the walls, their frames mismatched, their colors muted beneath a thick layer of dust.
I stepped toward the nearest canvas, my bare feet whispering over the floorboards, and leaned in. I blew the dust off in a sharp puff and immediately coughed as the cloud exploded back into my face, tasting like chalk.
It was a painting of a group of friends crowding around a table, laughing figures with halos of impossible color surrounding them, violets where skin should be, smeared streaks of teal and amber and red floating around their heads.
My chest tightened. The brushstrokes. The dreamlike blur.
It looked like… Rua’s work.
Perhaps Kathleen could see color like Rua.
It would explain the colors wrapped around the people like auras.
I drifted to the bedside table, drawn by the scatter of shapes there. Photographs in frames sat across the surface. I studied them. Kathleen in front of the main Ravenwood building, standing with an older man, chest puffed up with pride—her father, maybe.
Kathleen in a porch swing in front of a stone cottage covered in ivy, her smile wide and effortless.
Kathleen was laughing with friends in the rest of them; the same green necklace sat at her collarbone in every shot.
Dancing around a bonfire waving beer bottles like scepters, hair wet as they lay out on beach towels, toothy grins trimmed with ice cream, several with various concert stages in the background, their arms linked, holding plastic cups or tongues out and fingers held up in the sign of the devil’s horns.
My throat tightened. No babies. No twins. No proof I’d ever existed. My hands curled into fists before I realized I’d done it.
She had room for everything else. Friends. Parties. Concerts. But not her two oops babies.
My throat burned as I wiped a tear away with the heel of my hand, angry at myself for letting it fall.
She erased us.
She erased me.