Chapter 26 The Summer Of Goodbye's
June arrives with a heat wave that turns Oakhaven into a simmering green furnace.
The air conditioning in the Sterling house works overtime, humming through the vents like a tired heartbeat. The twins have abandoned the backyard for the cool darkness of the basement, where they've built an elaborate fort out of couch cushions and fairy lights. Sophie calls it the Kingdom of No Grown-Ups Allowed, then immediately begs every grown-up she sees to come inside and admire it. Sam mostly roars at the walls.
I'm in my room—my real room, the one that used to be a guest room and now has my name on a little wooden sign Sophie painted for my birthday—sorting through a pile of college brochures. They've been accumulating on my nightstand for weeks: art schools with names I never imagined applying to, financial aid forms that make my head spin, letters from admissions counselors who read about the Sterling trial and my role in it and want to offer me "opportunities."
The attention still makes me uncomfortable. I didn't testify because I wanted fame. I testified because it was the truth. But the world doesn't always care about your intentions.
A knock on my door. Eleanor, holding two glasses of iced tea. "You look like you're drowning in paper."
"I'm drowning in paper." I shove the brochures aside to make room for her. "How did you decide where to go? There are so many options."
"Honestly? I picked the one that gave me the most scholarship money and had the best journalism program. The rest I figured out later." She sits on the edge of my bed, her expression softening. "You're thinking about staying close to home, aren't you?"
"Is it that obvious?"
"All the brochures you've actually opened are within a two-hour drive. The ones from California and New York are still in their envelopes."
I look down at the pile. She's right. I've been telling myself I'm keeping my options open, but my hands have been making a different choice.
"Things are finally stable here," I say. "Sophie and Sam are happy. Mom is visiting more. You're leaving in August, and Caleb's leaving in August, and Margaret and Caroline are still figuring out how to co-parent. If I leave too—"
"You're worried it'll all fall apart."
"I'm worried they'll need me and I won't be here."
Eleanor sets down her iced tea. "Maya, you spent seventeen years being invisible. Then you spent a year being the glue that held this family together through a murder trial. You're allowed to want something for yourself."
"What if what I want is to stay?"
"Then stay. Go to the community college for two years, transfer later. Live at home. Be here for the twins. There's no shame in that." She pauses. "But make sure it's what you actually want. Not what you think you owe us."
I lean back against my headboard. "When did you get so wise?"
"Diana Kerr." Eleanor grins. "Turns out investigative journalism involves a lot of therapy-adjacent conversations with traumatized sources. She says I have a gift for listening."
"You do. You always have."
She shrugs, but I can tell she's pleased. The girl who tried to blackmail me in a boathouse feels like a stranger now. This Eleanor—the one who pinky-swears Sophie, who drinks iced tea in my room, who's become my closest confidante—is my sister. My real sister, in every way that matters.
\---
Downstairs, the kitchen is in its usual state of controlled chaos.
Caroline is at the stove, making something that smells like her grandmother's recipe—she's been cooking more of her family's dishes lately, reclaiming a heritage William tried to erase. Margaret is at the island, her laptop open, muttering at a spreadsheet. The Sterling divorce was finalized months ago, but the legal and financial fallout continues: frozen assets, contested properties, a maze of paperwork that Margaret navigates with grim determination.
"Am I interrupting?" I ask from the doorway.
"Only if you object to pierogies," Caroline says. "Margaret won't try the sauerkraut ones."
"I don't like fermented cabbage. That's not a moral failing."
"It's a culinary failing. Ask anyone."
Margaret catches my eye and rolls her own, but she's smiling. This easy banter between them still feels miraculous—two women who could have been enemies, choosing instead to be something else. Not quite friends. Not quite co-parents. Some new category they're inventing as they go.
"Maya, there's a letter for you on the counter," Margaret says. "From the prison."
The kitchen goes quiet.
William Sterling has been sending letters. To everyone. Apologies, explanations, justifications, pleas for forgiveness. Most of them go unread—Eleanor burns hers in the backyard fire pit, and Caleb throws his directly into the trash without opening them. Caroline reads every single one, then files them away in a box labeled EVIDENCE. "For when he inevitably appeals," she says.
But letters addressed to me are rare.
I pick up the envelope. My name is written in his handwriting—a sharp, elegant script I've only seen before in the margins of police reports.
"Are you going to open it?" Caroline asks carefully.
"I don't know." I turn the envelope over. "He's never written to me directly before. Only through his lawyers."
"You don't have to read it," Margaret says. "You don't owe him anything."
I know she's right. I know I could throw it in the trash and never think about it again. But there's a part of me—the part that stood on the fifty-yard line and demanded the truth, the part that still draws family trees in her sketchbook—that needs to know what he has to say.
"I'll read it later," I say, tucking the letter into my pocket. "After dinner."
Margaret nods, and the kitchen gradually returns to its normal rhythm. The pierogies sizzle. The spreadsheet grows. Sophie appears from the basement, demanding to know when Eleanor is coming back down to play princess-dinosaur-supreme-court (a game of her own invention that apparently involves both tiaras and roaring).
But the letter sits in my pocket like a stone.
\---
That night, after everyone is asleep, I open it.
Sitting on the edge of my bed, the envelope torn open, the single sheet of paper in my hands. His handwriting is the same as it was in the margins of Drew's police report—sharp, elegant, utterly controlled. The handwriting of a man who spent his life believing he could shape reality with words.
Dear Maya,
I know you have no reason to read this. If you've thrown it away unopened, I deserve that, too. But my lawyer tells me you deserve to know the full truth, and I've spent enough years lying.
You asked me once what I wanted. At the trial. You said I had to choose—to acknowledge what I'd done, to all of you. I didn't have an answer then. The truth is, I've spent my whole life not knowing what I wanted. Just knowing what I was afraid of losing.
My father was a cruel man. He built Sterling Industries with his fists and his fury, and he expected me to be his perfect heir. No mistakes. No scandals. No weaknesses. I learned to lie before I learned to read. I learned that power was the only thing that kept you safe.
That's not an excuse. It's a confession.
I'm not writing to ask for your forgiveness. I'm writing because there's something you need to know. Something I've hidden from everyone—even my lawyers. Something that might change everything.
You have a brother. A brother you've never met. His name is Oliver, and he was born two years before you. His mother was a woman named Helen Marchetti—you won't find her name in any of the records. I made sure of that. She died in childbirth, and I paid her family to keep quiet.
Oliver was adopted. I don't know where he is. I don't know who he's become. But he's out there. He's your brother.
Maybe you'll want to find him. Maybe you won't. Either way, you deserved to know.
I'm not asking for anything in return. I'm not trying to redeem myself with this information. I've done too much damage for that. I'm just trying, for the first time in my life, to tell the truth.
If you read this far—thank you. Not for me. For yourself.
William
The letter trembles in my hands.
Another brother. Another erased child. Another secret my father buried.
Oliver. The name echoes in my head, a new branch on the family tree I've been drawing for a year. A brother I never knew existed. A brother who's out there somewhere, probably unaware that his biological father is a murderer, that he has three sisters and two brothers, that he belongs to a family he's never met.
I read the letter again. Then a third time.
Then I pull out my sketchbook and begin to draw.
\---
Eleanor finds me in the morning, still awake, still drawing. The sketchbook is open to a new page: a boy with no face, standing at the edge of a forest, looking toward a house he's never seen.
"What's that?" she asks, sitting down beside me.
I hand her the letter.
She reads it in silence. Her face doesn't change—Eleanor is good at keeping her face still, a skill she learned in all those years of hiding her pain. But when she finishes, she sets the letter down very carefully, like it might explode.
"Another brother," she says.
"Another brother."
"And you want to find him."
I look at my drawing. The faceless boy. The forest. The house. "Someone should. He deserves to know where he comes from. He deserves to know he's not alone."
Eleanor is quiet for a moment. Then she reaches over and takes the pencil from my hand.
"Then we find him," she says. "Together."
"Eleanor—"
"I'm a journalist now, remember? Finding people is what I do. And he's our brother. That makes him family." She pauses. "Besides, Sophie's going to be furious if she finds out there's another sibling she hasn't met. You know how she feels about family reunions."
A laugh escapes me—small and tired, but real. "You're serious? You want to help me track down a stranger William erased before any of us were born?"
"I want to help you track down our brother." She corrects me. "There's a difference."
Outside, the sun is rising over Oakhaven Lane. The pool lights click off. The filter hums its eternal hum. Sophie's voice drifts through the house, already negotiating with Margaret about breakfast.
A new chapter. A new search. A new beginning.
"Okay," I say. "Let's find him."