Chapter 126 Integration
Two months after Montana.
Catherine sat in the bakery at 5 AM, watching Claire work.
“You always wake up this early?” she asked.
“Bread doesn’t wait for convenient hours.” Claire smiled. “Want to learn?”
“I don’t know. I’m not really…I’ve never been good at cooking.”
“Neither was Ariella. She’s still terrible. But she tries.” Claire gestured to the counter. “Come on. Worst case, you make bad bread. We’ve all made bad bread.”
Catherine approached cautiously. This whole family felt like walking on ice, beautiful but terrifying, one wrong step and she’d fall through.
She’d been in New York for eight weeks. Living in Lily’s room. Lily had insisted, had moved to the couch without complaint. Going to a new school. Meeting cousins she’d never known existed.
It was overwhelming.
“Start with the flour,” Claire instructed. “Measure carefully. Baking is chemistry pretending to be art.”
Catherine measured. Claire corrected her grip. Showed her how to fold ingredients together.
“My mom, my other mom Anna…she didn’t bake,” Catherine said quietly. “She was always working. Teaching. We ate a lot of takeout.”
“Did she talk about us? About her old life?”
“Never. She just said she’d made mistakes when she was young. That she was trying to be better.” Catherine’s hands stilled. “I didn’t know I had a whole family out there. A brother. Sisters. Cousins. I thought it was just…just me and her. And then just me.”
Claire covered Catherine’s hands with hers. “Well, now it’s not just you. Now it’s all of us. Whether you want us or not.”
“I want you,” Catherine said quickly. “I just don’t know how to be part of this. Everyone has history. Inside jokes. Shared trauma. And I’m just the surprise sister from Montana who doesn’t know anything.”
“You know more than you think. You survived losing your mom. You survived alone. You survived learning your entire life was a lie.” Claire squeezed her hands. “That’s very Frost of you.”
“Everyone keeps saying that. ‘Very Frost.’ What does that even mean?”
“It means you survive things that should break you. Then you make bread about it.”
Catherine smiled.
At school, things were harder.
Catherine’s classmates knew who she was. The livestream had made the Frosts famous. Catherine’s arrival, the secret sister had been news.
“Is it true your mom faked her death?” a girl named Tasha asked at lunch.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“To protect us from people who wanted to kill us.”
“That’s so messed up.”
“Yeah.”
The other kids didn’t know how to talk to her. She was a novelty. A tragedy. A story, not a person.
Except one girl. Maya. Quiet. Smart. Sat alone usually.
“Want to sit with me?” Maya asked one day. “I promise not to ask about your dead mom or the criminal network or why you’re related to people who were on TV for two months.”
Catherine sat. Grateful. “What do you want to talk about?”
“Literally anything else. Have you seen the new Marvel movie?”
“No. We don't have a lot of money for movies.”
“Want to go Saturday? My treat. As a ‘welcome to New York, your family is bananas’ gift.”
Catherine laughed. Actually laughed. For the first time in weeks.
“Yeah. I’d like that.”
At home, integrating was slower.
Elena loved Catherine immediately. Called her “Cathy” and insisted they share everything.
“This is my room but it’s your room too,” Elena announced, showing Catherine her space. “And this is my stuffed elephant but you can hold him when you’re sad. And this is Ethan but you can’t hold him because he bites.”
“I do NOT bite!” Ethan protested. Then immediately bit Elena’s arm to prove his point.
Catherine found herself laughing. This chaos. This noise. So different from the quiet Montana house where she’d lived with just Anna.
But Aiden was careful. Distant. Polite but not warm.
“He doesn’t hate you,” Lily explained one night. They were sharing a room now, Lily had insisted on bunk beds, like this was summer camp instead of permanent living arrangements. “He’s just processing. Our mom left him when he was seven. Didn’t tell him she was alive. Let him grieve for fifteen years. That’s…that’s hard to forgive.”
“Should I leave?” Catherine asked. “I don’t want to make things worse…”
“No. Absolutely not. You’re family. He’ll come around. He just needs time.”
“How much time?”
“However long it takes.”
That phrase again. The Frost family motto apparently.
Three months in, things shifted.