Page 183 of Unexpected Heroine

My ADHD squirrel is having a field day with all these unanswered questions. My thoughts are stuck in a perpetual loop.

On one side of the curve, I think about Tomer and all the love we shared over the last year, coupled with how he tenderly cared for me this last week. And every day before that. It just doesn’t jive with someone who could conceal something so significant. That don’t make a lick of sense.

The other curve of my mental loop is loaded with thoughts about my mother. Not my grandma, but my real mother. I wonder if she thought my biological father was dead. If so, how did she cope? Or was all that bullshit? Maybe she hid it intentionally.

From there, my thoughts start spiraling faster and wilder than the death coaster Marie Evans and Rosie Lekatz made me go on at the Climax Corn Festival. Still shocked we lived to tell the tale of that disaster. People who go on coasters put together by drunk carnies are a whole other breed. That day, I learned I was not that breed.

Anyhow. Where was I?

Oh yeah. My crazy thoughts.

Did my grandparents believe my father died in the war? If not, how could they lie to me about that and who my mother was for so long?

Or perhaps my father lied to my mother? Maybe he didn’t want to be a dad, and when he found out she was knocked up, he had someone tell her he died in battle or something stupid like that.

Will I ever find out the truth?

At some point, I’ll need to confront my biological father. Hopefully, when I do, I’ll find out if the theory of him lying to my mother holds water. I don’t think it does, though. It’s as if I’m grasping for straws. If my father—Alan Lancaster—lied to my mother to get out of becoming a father, then he would know I exist, right? Whether he chose to be in my life wouldn’t change him knowing about me. Yet when I asked if my father knew about me, Tomer was clear that he did not.

Which means... yet again, the people who raised me and were supposed to love me more than anyone in this world deceived me.

Lies on top of lies.

Which begs the question, why would Papa only tell me half the truth on his deathbed?

Nothing I can fathom explains that stumper.

The only other option is that all of it is bullshit.

Maybe Violet Holt has been fooled again. Perhaps my father isn’t alive, and it’s a big misunderstanding.

My head hurts.

And the pinnacle of fucked-uped-ness out of this whole thing is that I’m not processing the horrible atrocities that happened to me last weekend because my mind is a viscous stew of all that other shit.

Ovarying up enough to leave the apartment is sooo far down on my list of things to tackle that it might as well not be there.

Freya nudges my thigh gingerly, recapturing my attention. “Lettie?”

I blink, shaking out of the haze. Now that my thoughts have journeyed again down that double-decker highway of confusion, I’m substantially less annoyed with my girl squad.

My expression softens when I meet her kind eyes. “Sorry. I zoned out for a second. Did you ask something?”

She offers me a pitying half-smile. “Wanna watch a movie?”

“Freya, I’m not ready to leave the house. Could we watch one here?”

A slow, solemn nod is her only response.

As we settle on the couch, my mind travels down a new road. The movie plays, but I don’t absorb any of it.

Oddly enough, with her no longer needling me to leave the house, I’m itching to go somewhere. But not to the movies or the beach.

Knowing my father is only a few miles away and that he has no idea I exist makes staying locked inside my apartment begin to feel stifling.

Claustrophobic.

If he really is my father, I want to know him.

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