What better way than to rip siblings apart from birth and put them in different socio-economic households? I had to admit it was a brilliant study. It would have been if it weren’t so inhumane. If it hadn’t changed the fabric of these people so deeply. It wasn’t just the way they grew up that changed them. Debbie and Neil Maslow found that by taking them away from each other from such a young age, they were altering their psyches. Compared to the children who stayed together, these babies showed signs of trauma early on. They were angered easily; their speech was delayed in some cases.

My PI sent videos he was able to get illegally. Videos that showed the kids, Eva, Stella, and Wendy, recorded separately as they spoke to their therapists, people they’d come to know as family rather than doctors. All these years, they’d been feeding them medication to numb the pain, maybe because of the guilt they felt for doing what they’d done, or maybe because it was the way of the doctor. If you can’t fix something, medicate it. My stomach roiled. How would I give this information to Eva? It would break her heart. It broke mine and I hadn’t been the subject of the experiment. I shut my eyes and saw one of the videos play in my head, of when Eva was just a child, maybe five years old, asking why no one wanted her. Debbie Maslow took on the role of doting caregiver in the video. She’d smiled softly and tried to hug Eva, who wouldn’t let her. She told her that she was wanted, by Debbie, by Neil. She never mentioned Karen. Not once. It made me wonder a few things: Was Karen a bad person or had they vilified her in their narrative? Had they brainwashed Eva from an early age and molded her into a person who didn’t trust her own mother? If you couldn’t trust your own mother—the person who swore to protect you—then who can you trust?

I stood up and knocked on the door, bracing myself for the inevitable. There was no answer. I knocked again and leaned in, trying to hear if the water was running. It wasn’t. Finally, I used the key to unlock the door and stepped into an empty room, with an empty, unmade bed, and the lights on.

“Eva?” I walked to the bathroom, then the closet. “Where are you?” When I exited the closet, I saw a bottle of Blue Label and two glasses set on the table.

One looked untouched while the other was drained of alcohol. I could guess which was whose, I just didn’t know who the second glass was for. My frown deepened. Last night, after I left her room, I went to the piano. She’d come down and sat on the couch, watching me play for a few minutes before standing and walking out.

“Going to bed?” I’d asked.

“I’m tired,” she whispered. “So tired.”

She looked tired. She looked off. I berated myself for not standing from the bench and going after her, but I wanted to respect her wishes. I didn’t want to push her away and just a couple of hours earlier she’d asked for space before she kissed me and pulled me into the room. The phone on the nightstand caught my eye. I walked over and picked it up. Eva didn’t go anywhere without her phone hanging out from her back pocket. In my gut, I felt something was terribly wrong and my gut was never wrong. Well, rarely wrong. I’d been terribly wrong about her in the beginning. I took her phone and walked downstairs in search of her or anyone who may have seen her.

In the kitchen, I found Will and Wolf eating Pop-Tarts. They stopped talking and looked up at me when I stepped into the room.

“Have you guys seen Eva?”

“No.” That was Wolf. His eyes were bloodshot and I knew he was high out of his mind.

“She was roaming the house this morning,” Will said.

“Roaming the house?”

“She was in the library, then the piano room. She plays a hell of a Beethoven.” Will’s brows rose. “Symphony No. 5 she said. It sounded clean.”

“Eva was playing piano?” I felt my heart pound faster, her cell phone in my back pocket feeling heavier as I stood there.

“Yeah. Why?”

“That wasn’t Eva.”

Wolf dropped his Pop-Tart. Will’s face went from confused to horrified. The only person it could have been was Stella, but Stella was at The Institute. Wasn’t she?

Chapter Thirty-Five

Eva

She didn’t knock me out. I was groggy enough that I needed help walking, but I chose to walk with her. I chose to let her lead me into the woods and into the building they slept in. I wanted to meet my mother. I wanted to know my sister. I longed for family, despite what she’d said about our mother. I wanted to know about her upbringing, really know, but when I got to the building the only thing I could do was pass out on a small, hard bed. When I awoke, there were four pairs of eyes staring at me. Sister Marie was one of them. Wendy was another. The other two were strangers to me, but they stood and walked out of the room the second I sat up.

Tags: Claire Contreras Secret Society Romance
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