Unveiling The Lie 2
“Harlyn.” My mom reached for my hand, but I pulled away faster before she could touch me. It wasn't necessarily on purpose, it was more an instinct to reject whatever she wanted to tell me.
Her eyes widened in surprise before her face crumpled, but I looked away. I didn't have it in me to care even if I didn't mean to hurt her.
“Parenting you was the last order given to us by our Alpha,” my dad said finally. His voice was steady, but I caught the way his fingers tensed against the dresser. “Your father. Alpha Torren Lockwood of the Moonstone Pack.”
His words settled over me like frost. I let them sink in. Let them claw their way inside me and burn me cold. I shivered.
The last order. It was an assignment. A responsibility handed down by some dead Alpha I’d never even known.
My heartbeat was a dull thud in my ears. “So when he died, I technically became your problem.”
“No,” my mom whispered, her voice cracking. “It was never like that.”
“Then how was it?” I snapped curtly.
My dad stood straight, affirming bluntly. “Harlyn, you are our daughter.”
I let out a hollow laugh. “By whose definition?”
Silence. I stood from the bed, stepping back to put some space between us. The closer I was to them, the tighter the pressure clamping down on my chest and it was uncomfortable.
“I don’t understand,” I muttered, running my hand through my hair. My voice shook despite my best efforts to hide my despair. “Why keep it from me? Why?“
“We never wanted you to feel like you didn’t fit in the family,” my mom confessed, still sitting on the bed with her hands wringing together.
I scoffed. “Well, mission failed.”
My dad sighed. “Harlyn, you finding out was certainly inevitable, that, we were quite aware of. But we wanted you to have a childhood that wasn’t shaped by the weight of what you are and what you are hiding from.”
I turned to face them. “What I am.” I shook my head. “Somehow there was so much focus on hiding what I am, no one considered how I'd feel about who I am. Who the hell is that, exactly? Because from where I’m standing, I have no idea.”
Their silence was deafening and it stretched my patience thin.
I turned away from them to face a wall. I held my arms tight around myself like I could hold my ribs together, keep them from breaking apart under the force of everything I was feeling.
A shaky breath escaped my mouth in parts. I faced them to tell them honestly. "I don’t know how to feel."
I hated how raw my voice sounded and how true my words were. Anger? I was well past that. Sadness? It was overwhelming but it was hard not to think about all the ways they'd shown up for me, ways that had nothing to do with blood.
My dad took a cautious step forward, his hands clamping by his sides. "Don’t rush yourself to feel everything."
I shook my head, my grip on myself tightening. “You don’t get it. I can't—” My voice cracked, and I sucked in a sharp breath, trying to swallow down whatever it was. "I don’t know what part of me is really mine. I don't know what was real and what was just borrowed time."
My dad paused as my mom stood with a solemn look but I kept going, too far gone to stop now. "Every memory, every second, it was just borrowed, wasn't it? Like a house that was never mine to live in. And you,” I paused to take a breath. “You let me decorate it, let me settle in, but at the end of the day, the foundation wasn’t mine, was it?" My chest rose and fell too fast, and I hated how weak I sounded.
My mom interjected, moving forward to stand in front of me."Yes, the foundation wasn't yours but that's because it wasn't ours to build in the first place.“ She firmly explained.
My vision blurred as I listened. My dad was watching me, his expression open in a way I’d never seen before. “We have never loved anyone the way we love you," he said sounding so sure, I believed him. "But we will never insult you by pretending we could have loved you as much as the people who made you.”
A fresh ache bloomed in my chest. I didn't want to think about the life I could have lived with my real parents or the fact it had been stolen because they were dead. Instead, I wanted to focus on the fact they'd given me up because that was easier to deal with.
But they were making it hard for me.
“You were born out of love, Harlyn,” my mom conceded softly. “A love so deep and desperate that it asked the world to keep you safe, even if it meant never seeing you again.”
My throat closed up. I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I sniffled as the tears streamed down. My lips quivered as I listened. I was loved and I could never really feel just how much.
"You were not abandoned," my dad added. "You were entrusted to us. And we would do it all over again, every second, every choice, every lie, if it meant keeping you safe just a little longer."
I wiped my eyes furiously. "You lied to me my whole life."
"Yes," my mom admitted. "Because we loved you enough to pretend you were ours."
I fell to my knees letting my heart out as I cried. It was frustrating, that the situation had become like this, that I was inclined to doubt if anything was real or not.
I'm sure they loved me. Not in the way my real parents had, not in the way they were meant to. But they had loved me enough. Enough to do the many things they did for me. I'm just scared that one day they'd realize they could have had a better life with their kid.
My dad crouched with me, wrapping his arms around me without hesitation, without asking for permission. "Don’t think about anything," he murmured. "Just be ours a little longer."
And despite everything, despite the storm raging in my chest, I let myself believe him.