Page 37 of Not Made to Last

In my mind, he appeared out of thin air, age sixteen, and everything before that is… static.

No movement. No change. No clear picture of who he was prior. Then again, he’s never told me about his past, and I’ve never asked because I was warned not to. Not that it ever mattered to me. The version of him I’ve come to know is all I’ve ever wanted.

All I’ve ever needed.

He sets down the Rubik’s Cube as if it’s fragile and picks up a bouquet made of LEGO sitting in a glass vase. “Max again,” I tell him and leave it at that. Divulging that he’d given it to me for Mother’s Day would just open a line of questioning I’m not ready to endure. After putting the fake flowers back, Rhys glances around, saying, “You have a lot of plants.”

“I like to challenge myself.”

“How so?”

I shrug. “See if I can keep things alive.”

His eyes snap to mine, filled with an emotion I can’t decipher, and I have to wonder exactly how much he’s uncovered in his recent stalking. Silence fills the air until he finally says, “This is dope.” He makes his way over to the raised part of the room, sits on the edge of the bed with his legs out in front of him, and motions to my dollhouse. “Your grandpa make this?”

I sit next to him and nod, even though he’s not looking at me. At nearly four feet high, it took us almost a year to build the dollhouse. “It’s a replica of our old house.” And my most prized possession.

“The one in Wilmington?” he asks.

I turn to him. “How did you?—”

“I studied your brother, remember?” He pauses a beat. “You know Michael Jordan’s from Wilmington?”

“You don’t say?” I mock.

With a low chuckle, he pushes into my side, then leans forward to pull out the two wooden figures from the play kitchen. One white. One brown. “You and Dom?” he asks, and I nod. He points to the two other figures in the living room of the dollhouse. “Mom and Dad?”

“Grandma and Grandpa for me. Mom and Dad for Dom. But they raised us as siblings.”

Rhys’s quiet a moment, and so I turn to him, watch his eyebrows lower with each passing second. “So is Dom a brother to one of your parents or…?”

“No.”

Rhys turns to me, catches me watching him, but I don’t care.

“My grandparents used to foster kids. Usually they were emergencies, but some of them were more long-term. They did it mainly when my mom was growing up.” I don’t tell him that I’m almost certain it’s the reason she hates kids as much as she does.

“Dominic was a foster kid?”

“He was,” I answer, nodding. “Until they adopted him. He was four when he came to us. I was five. My mom had given over legal rights of me to my grandparents within weeks of having me, so I’d lived there all my life. I’d seen foster kids come and go, but Dominic… he was… special.” A knot forms in my throat, and I lower my gaze, try to breathe through the sudden ache in my chest.

“Did he give you the nameOhana?” Rhys asks, his tone gentle.

“Yeah.” I nod, just once. “That’s kind of how my grandparents knew they had to make it official,” I say through bated breaths. “We were so close—Dom and me. We still are… which is why being with you like this feels like such a betrayal to him.”

“I get that,” Rhys says, so quietly I barely hear him. “And if you want me to leave, I understand.”

I do. But also: “I don’t.” Besides, it was Dom who wanted me to strive for more than peaceful satisfaction, right? To seek some excitement or adventure, or something to feel passionate about… Rhys ticks all those boxes… at least for one night.

“And where does Max fit into all of this? Did they adopt him, too?”

“Max and Dom are half-brothers. Same mom.” I release all the air in my lungs, let my shoulders deflate with heaviness of the truth. “Dominic was given up for adoption because his parents were super young when they had him. By the time his mom had Max, she was in a far better place in her life, but… there was an incident that claimed both his parents. That’s how the authorities found out about Dominic and why they reached out to my grandparents. Max had only been with us for a couple of months before…” Before it all happened again. “They didn’t get a chance to legally adopt him. So, for now, he still has his biological parents’ last name. We have a Mitchell, a Delgado, anda Harris.” I take out my phone and find the last picture we took of all of us together, then show it to him. “We’re probably the most diverse family you’ll ever meet.”

He smiles as he looks at the picture of me and my brothers with my grandparents standing in front of our old house. My grandma is white, and my (step) grandpa is Filipino—the source of Delgado. Then there’s Dom, half black, half Iranian, and Max, whose parents were both black, and me, the only kid with an accessible parent, but whose parent won’t say who or where half my DNA is from. Dominic says I should take one of those DNA test kits, but I’m almost afraid of what I’ll find out. That, and the rabbit hole it might lead me down.

Rhys is still staring at my phone, his eyebrows drawn, mind racing a million miles a minute, trying to piece it all together. “Does that mean that Dom is technically your uncle?” he asks, and of all the things he could’ve said, I’m glad he went with something light.

“Yes.” I roll my eyes, locking my phone and setting it beside me. “And believe me, he reminds me of it whenever I try to tell him what to do.”

---