Inciting Events

Chapter 24

(Just to tell you before the chapter starts. This is the last chapter, just from Birdy's POV)

Birdy Anders

Birdy listened with her hands clenched as her sister explained their brother’s situation. After four years of thinking he was dead, they had been given the information that he was astonishingly alive. They yelled at Holiday for making such a horrible joke before she showed them a photo and a video that had been recently taken of him. There on that phone screen was undeniably her brother. All grown up with a melancholy look in his beautiful brown eyes. She had still been met with more backlash, but they eventually calmed down enough to listen. They were relieved and happy and excited and in tears, and she loved it. The thing that Birdy really didn’t like, though, was the rules, Holiday had a lot of rules for how this was going to happen. For how they were going to meet him again. For how she was going to interact with her own brother.

Don’t touch him.

Don’t expect him to talk a lot.

He might not remember things.

Don’t raise your voice at him.

Don’t make unexpected movements. Be slow and calm.

And the list went on and on of what they were allowed to do and what they weren’t allowed to do. Then another list came, a list that upsetted her parents even more than her surprisingly.

He won’t be staying at the house.

He won’t be around them for more than an hour a day.

He won’t be there every day.

He’ll spend more time with Holiday than the rest of them.

He has some friends that he considers family more than them.

The last one really infuriated her, more than the others at least. He had a group of random people he considered more family than them. Apparently, they were allowed to touch him, and they could be loud around him, and they knew what he liked and what he was doing. She was glad that at least Holiday was in this group but it only made her more mad when she realized that in order for her to be a part of that group she would’ve had to be around Cyrus and that meant she had known.

She had known about Cyrus being alive for long enough to get close enough to him that he would let her do things he barely let anyone else do. She had known and hadn’t told them. She tried to calm down as she didn’t want to yell at her sister, but it was hard. It was very, very hard.

She asked if they could at least know why all of this was the way it was. Shouldn’t Cyrus be overjoyed to be back with his real family after so long? Shouldn’t he be ready to hug them and tell them how he loves them?

Holiday had just sighed and said that that was his story to tell and that if he wanted to, he would, but she wasn’t willing to push him to tell any of them the details of what happened. She had said that he had been through things that none of them wanted to imagine, then she had looked at her parents. A look of realization came over their faces, and it was obvious that it affected them. Birdy wasn’t sure what that meant, but she knew it was bad, so she started crying. Imagining what had happened to him.

She was angry that she couldn’t even know the reason behind why she couldn’t do anything normal with him. She tried to keep it in as more tears slipped past her cheeks, and she tried to also keep those in. It was hard, and she didn’t like it, but she really had to be stronger right then.

She stood up with her father when her sister turned to open the door that her dead brother was supposedly behind. When that door did open, it took all the willpower in her being to not run towards him and embrace him. When she looked at her father, he seemed to be in shock as his mouth hung open, and he looked like he had seen a real-life ghost. This was probably because he had.