Chapter 135 CHAPTER 136: The Old Photograph

Chapter 135 CHAPTER 136: The Old Photograph


ARIA'S POV

I dropped my heavy pen onto the wooden desk, letting out a long, exhausted sigh. The ink bled a small blue circle onto my notebook, but I didn't care enough to blot it. I tried to focus on my normal routine after my conversation with Kai, but it was impossible. Every thought I reached for slipped sideways, pulled back into the same current of questions that had been dragging at me for days.

Why were strangers interested in me? Why were the brothers acting nervous? Why did it feel like every person in my life was holding the edge of a blanket and refusing to let me see what was underneath?

"Are you even listening to me, Aria?" Maya waved her hand in front of my face while we sat together in the cafeteria. "I said, are you going to the party this weekend?"

"What? Oh, sorry, Maya," I mumbled, resting my chin in my palm. "I'm just distracted."

"Distracted is an understatement," Maya laughed softly, though her eyes were filled with concern. "You've been spacing out for days. Is it the Steel brothers again? Did one of them say something stupid?"

"No, it's not just them," I whispered, shaking my head. The truth was bigger than any one person. It was everything, all at once, pressing down on me like a sky made of stone.

The more I thought about it, the more I started noticing small things I had ignored before. Little details from my childhood that never seemed to fit together, no matter which way I turned them. Like puzzle pieces from different boxes, forced into the same frame.

I remembered strange moments. The times we had to pack up all our things in the middle of the night and move to a new city without saying goodbye to anyone. I remembered waking up in the backseat of my mother's car, my cheek pressed against the cold window, watching streetlights blur past like falling stars while she drove in silence with her knuckles white on the steering wheel. She never explained where we were going. She never explained what we were leaving behind.

I remembered the locked boxes my mother kept under her bed. I asked about them once when I was nine, and she snapped at me so hard I cried for an hour. I never asked again. I remembered the strict rules about never talking to strangers or mentioning our past. Never tell anyone where we lived before, she would whisper, gripping my shoulders tight enough to leave fingerprints. Promise me, Aria. Promise me.

I always promised. I was a good daughter. I kept my mouth shut and swallowed the questions and built my life on a foundation of silence. But the silence was cracking now. I could feel it, splintering outward from the center like ice over deep water.

After school, I went straight to my bedroom and decided to do some digging of my own.

The suitcase was old, the zipper stiff, the fabric faded from years of being shoved into closets and under beds. I sat cross legged on my floor and opened it, pulling out items one by one. Old birthday cards with unfamiliar handwriting. A stuffed animal with one eye missing that I vaguely remembered sleeping with as a toddler. School report cards from cities I barely remembered living in.

At first I found nothing useful. My fingers ached from sorting through stacks of wrinkled papers and yellowed photographs of people I didn't recognize. The dust made my nose itch. I sneezed twice, wiped my face with the back of my hand, and kept going.

After hours of searching, I started feeling foolish for even trying. My arms were sore, and the room was a mess of scattered papers and old fabric. This is stupid, I thought to myself, wiping a strand of hair from my forehead. Mom was right. It's just old junk.

Then my hand brushed against something that wasn't supposed to be there.

A thin, rough edge wedged tightly beneath the cardboard lining at the very bottom of the trunk. Not sitting loosely in a box. Not tucked casually between old clothes. It had been taped down underneath the false bottom of the chest, completely out of sight. Someone had hidden it there on purpose. Someone who didn't want it found.

My fingers trembled slightly as I peeled the aged yellow tape away. The adhesive was brittle, crumbling to dust as I pulled. I slid the flap of the envelope open and let the contents fall gently into my lap.

Inside was a faded document containing a name I had never seen before.

I held the yellowed paper up to the faint light filtering through my window. The ink was old and slightly faded, but the text was perfectly legible. I read it once, then twice, then a third time, because my brain refused to accept what my eyes were seeing.

My name was written right there at the top in neat, typed lettering, alongside a string of birth registration numbers that made my head spin. There were legal seals, dates going back nearly two decades, and official pack stamps that I didn't recognize from any territory I had ever lived in.

And at the bottom, scrawled in flowing handwriting across a dotted line labeled either as a guardian or a witness, was a name.

"Valerie Vance," I whispered aloud, rolling the syllables over my tongue. The name meant nothing to me. I had never heard it spoken in my house. My mother had never mentioned a Valerie. No aunt, no cousin, no family friend, no old neighbor. Nobody.

But there it was, linked to my birth, signed in ink that had faded but never disappeared.

The discovery filled me with questions that felt too big for my small room. Was it a relative? Someone from my past? Or was it connected to whatever everyone seemed determined to hide from me? Why had my mother kept this hidden? Why had she never mentioned a woman named Valerie?

I considered confronting her immediately. I imagined walking downstairs the second Mom walked through the front door, waving the paper in her face and demanding answers. But I knew how that would end. She would lie. She would cry. She would make that terrified face she always made when I asked about our past, the one that looked like someone had just put a gun to her head. And then she would pack our things and force us to move away in the middle of the night all over again. She had done it before. She would do it again.

I carefully folded the crisp paper and slid it back inside the envelope. I tucked it safely into the inner pocket of my jacket, pressing it flat against my chest, right over my heart. I put the false bottom back into the trunk exactly the way I had found it, smoothing the tape flat and stacking the old clothes on top.

For the first time since all of this started, I felt like I had found something real. Not whispered warnings from the brothers. Not vague answers from Kai about new people asking questions. Not rumors or overheard conversations. This was something I had uncovered with my own hands, in my own room, from my own past.

The brothers were keeping secrets. Zane was acting strange. The pack officials were asking weird questions. But this? This was mine.

Whatever secret surrounded my life, I was finally starting to uncover it myself. The thought should have made me feel empowered. Instead, sitting there on my bedroom floor surrounded by the scattered remains of a childhood I barely remembered, I felt something much heavier settle into my bones.

I felt afraid.