Chapter Forty-One
Eva
Grief came in waves.
There was the denial. I’d just met my sisters, just started getting to know them and under insane circumstances, and now I’d lost one. I’d never known a loss this great and some days it felt strange to admit that. She’d only been in my life, in front of my face, for a couple of days, but it was as though we’d known each other our entire lives. When you have a deep connection, regardless of length of time, the pain is magnified. I hated it, really hated it. Most of all, I hated that she was so close to getting out. So damn close.
The anger. The anger I could deal with. I relished when the anger came, like an old friend I hadn’t spoken to in years but always seemed to find their way in my life. With the anger came the drinking, and in the past, the sex. I’d lost count as to how many times I’d picked up my phone to look for one of the apps I’d used for hooking up. Every single time, I thought of Adam, and I set it down. He’d allowed me to lose myself in him, but afterward, when I picked myself up and recoiled, the way I had in the past, with strangers, I could see the pain in his eyes. It was something I hadn’t experienced with those other guys, since they didn’t care about me the way Adam did. Seeing his pain was like inflicting it on myself, so I stopped using sex as a way to channel my anger and was on the path to learning to accept the love that came with it and him.
There was no bargaining in my grief. I knew it wouldn’t get me anywhere. I had nothing to bargain with.
The acceptance wasn’t coming at all. I just . . . I’d been looking for blood relatives for too long to just accept this loss.
It had been a week since the Manor Murders, as the members of The Eight were now calling it. It would have been a great headline in a paper, except, it wasn’t publicized. Even with the police being there and breaking things up. Even with the paramedics who were called. Even with all of the recorded evidence of wrongdoing, nobody outside of the residence knew what happened. It was as if Wendy had been a ghost. As if everyone killed that day had been insignificant in life and now in death. It hurt.
Neil and Debbie had both been arrested, but were out on bail. We had enough videos to put them behind bars, but because they’d been acquired by hacking into their server, they may not hold up in court. This was how I found myself walking into The Institute. After meeting with The Swords and The Eight, my memory was refreshed on what happened last year, when Amelia Bastón’s father had been arrested for murdering a girl. He’d been arrested and acquitted. Innocent men were placed behind bars and guilty ones walked every single day. I wasn’t going to leave any of this to chance. And Debbie was still here, running the show as if she had nothing to worry about. I jotted my name down on the check-in sheet and waited for them to process my arrival.
“Eva?” Debbie’s voice made me freeze.
I turned slowly. When I looked at her, I felt nothing but sadness. I should have felt anger. I would have welcomed anger, but that wasn’t how the mind worked. She’d conditioned me to see her as an ally, a source of comfort, and so my treacherous emotions were at odds.
“I’ll take her to her room, Candace,” Dr. Maslow said to the nurse as she walked over to me. “Come.”
I went. It was as if my feet weren’t my own.
She took me to the room I’d come to know as my own and walked me over to the seating area, which was a bench in a little nook where I was surrounded by biographies, memoirs, and early education books.
“I should have reached out weeks ago. I’m sorry,” she said. “I should have explained everything then. I’m sure you’ve heard awful things about us in the news, but you know how much they lie.”
“Were they lying about you owning St. Nicolas’ Orphanage?”
“Well, no, but to be fair, my great-great-grandfather was the owner and it fell upon us that way, otherwise we would have never sought it out.”
“Did they lie about you specifically targeting women in need? Bringing them over here and paying for their medical bills, their food, their children’s food, and then ripping the babies away from them?”
Debbie searched my eyes. I found no remorse in hers. No sign of discomfort. Nothing. My anger flared.
“Did they lie about you using my sisters and me in a study that’s lasted twenty years? Did they lie about how you recorded each interaction we had? Or how you trained us to sit here like this with you without ripping your eyes out the way we should have? Or how you turned us against our own parents because you needed us to be on your side and not theirs?” My voice was hoarse from shouting, my cheeks wet with tears, but I couldn’t seem to stop. “You tore families apart when you played God as if we were puppets for you to control and feed drugs to.”