Rekindling

Chapter 8 - Guilt

My name is fake.

Ever since Will dropped that latest bombshell, this thought has been going round and round in my head, like one of those carousel horses.

My name isn't Lily Taylor.

"Of course it is. Don't be bloody ridiculous," Will's harsh voice interrupts another round of my mental carousel.

I must have said out loud what is going through my mind. I also totally forgot that I am still on the phone with him. Looking at him, I force myself to get out of my head and come back to reality. After Will revealed his latest finding, I found it very hard to stay even remotely focused on the here and now. And it is still a struggle, no matter how hard I try.

"But you just said...," my voice falters before I can finish the sentence.

Will's words keep repeating themselves in my busy brain.

Our family name has not always been Taylor.

It is near impossible to concentrate on any kind of conversation with my brother.

"Yeah, I know what I said. Doesn't mean that it isn't our family name now, you silly child. They officially changed it to Taylor, for the whole family, so you're all legitimate and stuff. – At least as far as it comes to what's written on legal documents," he adds, probably thinking the same thing I am.

Because Alex is named as my father on my birth certificate and that is anything but legitimate, if what they told me is true.

But who knows what is the truth anymore, and what's a lie?

"I knew that Tom and Josh were on the East Coast," I suddenly, randomly, blurt out.

"What?" Will exclaims.

His face comes really close to the camera's lens, so close that his dark eyes are filling up the small screen. I physically recoil at his threatening behavior.

"What are you fuckin' talkin' about? And why is this the first I am hearing about this? Don'tcha think that this might have been, I dunno, relevant information? Information that you should have given me before I almost ran into them?" he all but yells at me.

Anger mixed with confusion is literally rolling off him in waves, I can feel it even through the phone. Automatically, my eyes fill with tears again. I don't even know where this random statement came from, about me knowing that they were there. It's like my brain has decided to act on its own, not allowing me to have any control over what I am doing and saying.

I rapidly blink a few times while desperately trying to put together another few of these jumbled pieces of information that are floating freely through the chaos that is my mind.

Finally, I manage to sort through some of snippets and that is when it hits me where this information came from. When I properly realize where and why I know that Josh and Tom were on the East Coast, a jolt of panic shoots through me.

Sean talked to me about this last night.

That was not even 24 hours ago. And still, I had so completely forgotten about this small but clearly important fact that it took me seemingly forever to remember it, even after Will told me the exact same thing.

Is this a sign that I am slowly but surely losing my mind?

That thought is even scarier than thinking of all the secrets and trust issues I have with the current situation. I don't know much about what it means to go through traumatic events and neither what it can do to a person and their health, physical or mental. But from the few times we talked about it, Josh went through a very, very rough time after they lost Sienna. He must have been in a bad way and considering that it was a therapist he was seeing to help him get better, it must have been his mind that suffered the most from the trauma of losing his sister.