When would it all come crashing down again?
It felt like it had just started, and yet I couldn’t help the uneasy feeling twirling in my stomach when I thought about the curse or Dom and me too much.
“Besides the normalcursed and tied to his ex, who he’s also now sleeping withweird?” asked Lu.
I didn’t respond as I got back to work. I pulled back a layer of old tissue paper. There were no bottles or anything I could see Lu wanting to use for the shop. There was only a thick stack of old Barnett High School yearbooks. Lifting one up, I skimmed through it, brushing off the film of dust that felt like it was stuck to the glossy pages. Pausing at the awful drama club costumes, I turned the page to the next black-and-white image—
My eyebrows furrowed at the photograph on the next page. Though not in color, it wasn’t at all blurry. I touched the sharp yet warmly smiling man in the picture.
I knew that smirk. I knew that jawline, pebbled with dark stubble and needing a shave.
“Find something good?” Lu called over from a few boxes away.
Without a word, I squinted at the photograph for another minute before turning the book around. It was of a teacher, clearly, leaning up against the blackboard, while students looked on in a candidly staged shot.
Lu’s eyes widened.
I knew I had seen it. “You see what I see, right?”
The resemblance. The man we were both looking at—save for some minor things, like clothing—looked exactly like Dom. Only this man did not have the curls in his hair or tattoos.
“Whoa.” Lu scooched toward me and the book, though I wouldn’t let her take it from my hand.
I still needed to sort this out. I searched the bottom caption until my eyes caught on a name.
Stephan Rovnik.
I swallowed.
“Our options are vampire or doppelgänger. Which are we going with?” asked Lu.
I flipped through more pages. Signatures were written by photos, and pages from the school newspaper fell out from the back. I lifted the fragile, worn paper, dated far more than a decade ago.
Beloved teacher and wife die in a car crashon the bridge leading to Barnett Isle.
Celeste climbed back up the stairs with another box. Her eyes narrowed on me. “Ana?”
I lifted the yearbook up for Celeste.
“Did you see this?” I barley got the sentence out before Celeste’s expression wavered. Calm settled over me as I let the book flop back down into my lap. “You knew.”
“Not at first.”
But eventually. “You recognized him. Why didn’t you say anything?”
“You know it’s not that simple,” she said.
“It kind of is,” I said. “What happened to the whole trying to be motherly and keep us safe from big scary men, act? These are the exact things you are supposed to warn a sister about.”
The woman blinked and took a deep breath. “It wasn’t my story to tell.”
“This was what you were talking to him about the other day at the house?”
“Partly.”
I couldn’t believe this. “This is his father.”
“Yes,” confirmed Celeste.
