𝐂𝐎𝐔𝐏𝐋𝐄 𝐎𝐅 𝐊𝐈𝐃𝐒 - jj maybank

- 𝐬𝐢𝐱

𝗢𝘃𝗲𝗿 𝘁𝗵𝗲 days, the bump grew more and more, faster and faster, so much that every hour she looked down at it, it would be a few centimetres bigger. Hoodies weren't really doing their justice anymore, so Kaci resorted to staying in bed all day and only leaving her room at midnight to steal food from the kitchen, the only time she socialised being when people called her or they came over.

The penthouse was empty a lot lately with all the ʼbusiness tripsʼ her parents had been taking, and Jordan spent a lot of his time at friendsʼ houses.

Kaci took the loneliness as an opportunity to search for things. Although she didn't yet have a due date, and even though she had no idea of the gender, she still needed to be prepared for whatever could happen in the next few months. She couldn't go shopping — too many people would notice her —, and she couldn't do everything online — the workers would be suspicious of all the packages —, however what she could do was go through her familysʼ old things.

She woke up extremely early that morning to sneak out the palace without anyone seeing her. Not many people in the hotel woke up before ten for breakfast — most of them were recovering from active nights and honeymoons — which meant the only people she had a chance of running into were the workers, who were too busy doing their job to pay attention to her then.

Everything from her childhood was kept locked up in a storage unit at the edge of the island, near the ferry and where all the suicidal people went to; it was cream and green and stunk of dirty meat.

Kaci blocked her nose as she unlocked hers, the smell getting worse as the door opened. The smell came from the Flores garage.

Everything inside was boxed. Stacks and stacks of boxes, rows and rows of cardboard, all labelled after somebody in the family. They went back generations, all the way before Kaciʼs great-abuelaʼs mom was a baby.

She scanned the room for a while, adjusting her hoodie so that it was over her nose, until she found the pile of boxes labelled ʼLuis, Kaci, Jordanʼ.

The first box she picked out was her youngest brotherʼs. The baby of the family — his reign was only going to last a few more months, though. It was filled with photo albums, each one being a year of his life. From him being zero to one, to eventually the fourteen-year-old Kaci knew and hated him as. She took a couple of pictures on her phone of his ugliest baby pictures, then sent them to his friends to embarrass him. Kaci took pride in being the hot older sister everybody loved.

The second box was filled with her own albums. Growing up, she looked a lot different to her brother. She acted a lot different, too. But there was one thing in common with both of them — they had absolutely no photos with their parents. No memories with them at all. Each photo they had with an adult was their old nannies or teachers.

Kaci vowed that she would never let her baby have a childhood like this. She would never put her business or her money before her child. She would be the mother every kid deserved. That every single baby picture was taken by her, that every single one of them her baby was smiling at her. Kaci wasn't going to let him or her down. She was going to make sure they were loved.

The third box was another one of Jordanʼs. The fourth was another of her own. Every box she went through was either hers or his. There wasn't a single one that had anything of Luis in. Each box that was labelled with his name was empty. There was nothing in this room that could prove that he was ever even there.

Kaci dug further, box after box, searching for just a single photo or piece of clothing that once belonged to her big brother. Behind her was a huge pile of things she could save for the baby, but that didn't matter to her anymore — she ran desperate looking for a piece of Luis. But there was nothing.