Capture My Heart (BK3: Niall Horan)

-Ch 12: Digging up the past.

CHAPTER TWELEVE- Digging up the past.

-Ashley Dawson-

I shifted my gaze back to the paper in front of me, everything I’d tried to accumulate from that one visit to Audrey. Although, it still wasn’t making sense. Whichever way I turned it, twisted it, tweaked it, it still didn’t work out. I heaved an exasperated sigh as I tapped my pencil against the carefully bound notebook in front of me; the white, clean slate of a page was laden with my rough sketches of what was supposed to be my family in a nutshell. The tree of decedents, simply put into a series of arrows, boxes, names, dates, pictures. There was everything there to prove that it was genuine, it was clear, everyone was telling the truth. And on the sheet beside me – my notes from Audrey - there was everything to prove that it wasn’t true.

On my right, next to my pot of pens, pencils and a small pink, 15cm ruler: There was the picture from November 14th 1994, the day I was born. Her back was turned, facing the wall the blonde, frizzy waves tumbled down her back reaching the small of it, teasing at the hem of her long skirt. I, was just a bundle of pink blankets in her arms, her small body shielded my even smaller one that was most likely wailing into the air. Somehow, from the back, you could still see the smile across my Auntie’s lips as she stared down at the screwed up, and red face of the new-born that was me.

However, on my left was the sheet of sentences I had put onto that Audrey had told me. Attached to it, was a paper clipping of a picture. The orange digital date in the corner told me that it was exactly the same day. In this one, Jane stood in the era of NYC at night; the adverts were all bright and illuminating behind her, providing a fickle backdrop for this one snapshot. And there she stood smiling at the camera in the rush of Times Square. There was the possibility that the date could have been wrong, maybe the camera was old and caught up in something, or maybe even futuristic, but somehow I didn’t think it was. Somewhere, there’d been a lie.

“What are you doing?”

I flinched at the voice, spearing through the silence. I had been half content in the quiet simplicity of the dining room, with nothing but the sound of the clock ticking, and the wind whistling across the windowpane outside. With haste, I spread my arms over the paper in front of me. But there were multiples scattered across the table top, all prints, photographs, certificates, none of which, I actually knew if they were genuine.

“N-Nothing.” I stammered, not exactly wanting to entangle someone else in the possible lies that were my family, notably, especially not Louis.

Louis smirked as he looked at me. His hair was scruffy, teased with the pervious stare of sleep and his upper torso was bare, pyjama bottoms covering his bottom half. He pulled a chair from the table, and took a sigh of a seat near me as he ran his gaze across the papers that were littering the surface of the table.

“You’re such a workaholic.” He commented and I refrained sighing in relief. He thinks this is work. “Wait…” he said, leaning over the table now. I winced as he narrowed his eyes at the many sheets before us, his brow furrowed in confusion and blatant deep thought. “What’s this…?”

He pulled the roughly sketched family tree from underneath my arm, raising his eye-brows sceptically at my hesitancy to let him hold it in his possession. I watched in silence for a few seconds as his milky blue eyes scanned busily over the paper, smothered in my neat block print.

“It’s just a family tree,” I snapped, snatching it from his grasp. He quirked an eye-brow, seeming even slightly bemused by my protective state of this one piece of paper.

“A family tree,” He repeated, his mockery was evitable and I shot him a look at it. “And when did you start working for an Ancestry company?”