Page 104 of Clap Back (Carter Brothers)

I blinked at Dima. “I don’t want you to go.”

The four of them looked relieved.

“I just don’t know what to say,” I admitted, sounding just as vulnerable as I felt in that moment. “I mean, logically, I know you’re my siblings. But I feel like that ratty, dirty kid looking into the diner window at all the people who can afford food when she can’t.”

It was Shasha who said, “You have a trust fund that’s bigger than all of ours because you haven’t touched yours and we have. Trust me when I say, you’re not a ratty, dirty, poor kid.”

A trust fund.

Who knew?

I was already shaking my head, though. “That’s not quite what I mean. I guess I just feel like y’all are part of a club that I want to be a part of but can’t.”

“You can,” Milena urged, reaching forward and grabbing my hand. “Come sit down.”

I followed her to the seating area that was just to the left of the pool, shaded by a beautiful trellis of climbing roses.

Idly I wondered whether the roses had been planted by Auden.

Probably.

That man and his green thumb were so appealing.

“Tell me everything,” I blurted out. “Start from the beginning, please.”

So they did.

“Well, I guess we should start with going to Gatlinburg,” Shasha looked guilty. “That was my fault. I saw the mountains there on the television one day when I was around twelve…”

When he was done telling me all about how he’d ‘screwed up’ and gotten us there, only for me to go missing mere hours after arriving, stolen from the state park right under all of their noses, I was just as devastated as they were.

Apparently, during a bathroom stop at the park, just north of Gatlinburg, they’d sent me in to go to the bathroom while the rest of them checked out the Little Pigeon River that ran alongside the road.

Since it was utterly deserted out there, and the only car in the lot was their car, they’d let me go alone, which they wouldn’t have done normally.

While they were looking at the river, I went missing.

From that point, they had no clue what happened to me. The reception in that area was spotty. No cameras were set up in that portion of the park. There were no people around for miles since they’d gone in the off season.

And even worse, they’d had to drive twenty minutes into town before they’d gotten enough reception to call the authorities.

They’d waited in Gatlinburg for a month while search parties had searched for me. I’d been all over the news. I’d even been on a milk carton.

Yet, all these years, they’d heard nothing.

They’d hired every single private investigator they could.

They’d just never been able to find me.

“It would be nice to know what happened and how I’d ended up with Brock Austin,” I said, not calling him my dad to them.

He wasn’t that. He’d never be that.

“Mom and Dad would be so stoked,” Nastya mused as she looked at her fingers. “They never gave up. We uprooted our life to move closer to Gatlinburg… just in case. Every single day since you disappeared, they searched for you. Their trip out of the country was because a woman fitting your description had been spotted amongst some school teachers who hailed from America.”

I deflated.

“I’m so sorry.”