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I’m emptying what’s left of my stomach in the toilet again.
When ‘Edie’ was finally able to speak, she explained how she had grown up. The police had already discovered who she was and the fact that Solomon had stolen her. Her biological father had arrived at the hospital where she was being treated, but the doctors wouldn’t let her see him, because she was so fragile they were afraid she would just fall apart forever.
But ‘Edie’…Edendidn’t.
She gathered the courage to tell the police and the doctors what had happened. No one knew at that point that before confronting Eden and killing himself, Solomon had come to my school to formally accuse me of forcing myself sexually on his ‘daughter’ and had asked for my expulsion.
The news does not mention that either—I think Eden discovered it later by herself. Maybe she came all the way to Greece to try to explain. Of course, what she met in Greece, was an ass (me), and she couldn’t tell me anything.
After she had described to the police the circumstances of Solomon’s death, someone broke it to her, as gently as they could, that Solomon was not her real father. That he was her uncle, and that he had taken her when she was a baby and raised her away from her real family.
That was when Eden had had her first panic attack. It had been so severe that they had had to revive her as if she’d been drowned or something. I push the phone away—I can’t read any more. I remember her at my show in New York, and then again the other day after she was mobbed at that club in Italy. How intense the panic attacks were, how they had looked scary like heart attacks, or worse. I dry heave and shake and when that’s over I struggle to breathe.
“Skye,” Miki’s voice is saying somewhere behind me. He’s called freaking Skye.
“No,” I try to say, but all that comes out of my mouth is ‘nnnnn’.
“It’s really bad,” Miki says into the phone. “You need to come. No, not in a minute. Now. We need help.”
So Skye comes and, of all things, he tries to give me a pill to calm me down. I know he means well. He looks so freaked out, bursting through the door, running at full speed towards me. The horrified expression on his face actually scares me enough to make me sit up and try to breathe normally.
“Zay?” he says in a small voice, kneeling next to me. “What’s wrong, boy?”
“I d-don’t want a pill,” I tell him.
“That’s right, you don’t,” he says immediately, relieved. “I’m sorry, I just… I don’t know how to help you. I’m scared, Isaiah. Tell me what you need.”
I try to speak, but I can’t. He wraps his arms around me as if that would help. Oh, wait. It does help. I can finally talk.
“All this time,” I murmur, falling apart as he presses me against his rock-hard chest, “this whole time, she’s had… she’s been… This horrible thing has been going on in her life, and I never knew. I never suspected it, not once, back then. She is so strong, Skye,” I’m sobbing now. He just holds me, his breathing labored. “She is so strong. And now… If possible, she must be even more broken than she was back then. And even stronger. But, my God, what do I do? I am so freaking useless, so powerless.”
“Eden?” Skye asks Jude over my head.
Jude nods. “He didn’t know she was‘Edie, the stolen girl’from Massachusetts,” Jude says. His voice is hoarse. “He didn’t know. No one thought to tell him.”
“He didn’t know?” Lou whispers, but I hear her.
“I didn’t tell him,” Jude says. “Everyone knows, and I didn’t want her to be embarrassed. Oh wait, you don’t watch the news, Isaiah, do you? So you didn’t… You never put together the story with the face. Dammit.”
“I never said anything about who she was,” Miki says, “although I knew at once. But you don’t say things like that out loud. Need to be discreet, right?”
This, coming from Miki.
“You are all idiots,” I murmur against Skye’s chest.
“Like you didn’t know that already,” Miki says.
“I never did anything to help her,” I say, still crying, “to be there for her.”
‘If my dad says we can’t be together, then we can’t.’
Those were her words when she broke up with me. Her only explanation.
Her ‘dad’ had been Solomon Kennedy.
And those words she said, the words that I never understood, that broke me for years and years… Now they haunt me as the most terrible thing anyone has ever done to another human being.
She wasn’t able to choose. To choose between me and him, or to choose anything else in her life. She wasn’t free to choose me. The man literally called her his ‘pet’. Her middle name is Persuasion—they didn’t say that on the news, but I bet that asshole convinced her that calling her ‘pet’ was his nickname for her middle name.
