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“I just needed to sort some things out,” I reply, hoping it’s enough to justify why I bailed from school early.
“Does this have anything to do with Valentina?”
“Why would you think that?”
“Oh, no reason. Except maybe for the fact that she’s been upstairs in your room for the past hour waiting for you. I thought you two might have had a falling out.”
Shit.
“Valentina’s here?”
My grandmother nods. “Upstairs,” she repeats.
Double shit!
“I told her she could wait for you there.”
Instead of telling my gran how that was a colossal bad fucking idea, I give her a clipped nod and rush up the stairs, taking them two at a time, hoping Valentina isn’t freaking out right now.
In all the years we’ve known each other, I’ve never let Valentina come into my room, and for good cause, too. My grandmother giving her carte blanche to snoop around my things is all sorts of fucked up. There she will see my secrets. My heart. My fucking soul. And as brittle and broken as both are today, I’m not sure either could handle Valentina’s rejection.
Or worse—repulsion.
When I open the door to my room, I stand rooted to the spot, my lungs refusing to work with the sight before me.
Right at the very center of my room stands Valentina, silently taking in her surroundings. She takes a few steps to one wall in particular, in awe of the photographs pinned there, tracing each one with a gentle finger.
There are hundreds of them on display.
Some of Gran.
Others of Logan and Quaid.
Even one or two of my folks and Alex.
But most of them, ninety percent of them, are all her.
Her golden eyes stare back at herself, as she places a hand over her mouth to keep whatever she’s thinking locked inside her, only increasing my torment.
“You shouldn’t be here,” I say, slamming the door behind me with my foot.
“Is that so?” she mumbles under her breath. “Because it looks to me like I’ve always been here.”
I walk slowly to her, while she keeps her back to me. She closes her eyes when she feels my breath tickling her ear.
“I guess in a way, you have. So what do you think?”
“They’re beautiful. I don’t even recognize myself in most of them.”
I pull on a raven lock and twist it around my finger.
“They are all you. The real you.”
“I can see that.”
She points to a photograph when she was around fifteen, a small tug of a smile cresting her lips.
“I remember this day. We had been in the river all summer, and I hadn’t gotten the courage to jump off the rope yet. That was the day I finally had enough nerve to do it. I didn’t even realize you had taken your camera with you.”
