Chapter 2: When the Past Becomes Doubt
Isabella's POV
His arms were still around me, too tight, his breath coming ragged against my hair.
Fourteen years.
I let that sit in my head for exactly three seconds before I pulled back.
"Okay." I pressed both hands against his chest and put some space between us.
"Okay. Either you actually believe what you just said, or—" I narrowed my eyes at him. "Or this is you and Alex pulling some insane stunt."
Because that would track. Alex at four years old had convinced this entire family that the apocalypse was coming and we needed to relocate to the basement.
He'd made color-coded supply lists. Richard had gone along with it for two days before I put my foot down.
"Is that what this is?" I stepped back further and crossed my arms. "Because this is not funny, Ricky. Not even a little bit. You scared the hell out of me, and you—"
I gestured at his hand. "You actually hurt yourself. For a joke?"
He didn't answer. Just watched me with that unreadable expression, eyes tracking my every move like I might vanish between blinks.
I grabbed his wrist and pulled him toward the bedroom. "Come on. Where's the first aid kit?"
He followed without a word.
I found the kit in the nightstand drawer and yanked it open. The antiseptic was still sealed, bandages in their original packaging, everything fresh.
Thank God.
I dropped onto the edge of the bed and pulled Richard down next to me, then started unwrapping a gauze pad.
"Hold still."
He held still.
I pressed the antiseptic-soaked pad against the worst of the cuts, and he didn't even flinch. I glanced up at his face. Nothing. Like he couldn't feel it.
That's not normal.
I looked back down at his hand. Really looked this time. The cuts weren't shallow—they were deep, deliberate, the kind that took real pressure to make.
All that red spreading across his palm reminded me, suddenly and horribly, of the water in the car. The blood from someone else's head wound clouding the water around me, swirling dark in the floodwater as the car went under.
I swallowed hard and kept wrapping.
"This is a lot of damage," I said quietly, "for a joke."
Silence.
"It's not a joke, is it."
Still nothing.
I finished tying off the bandage and sat back.
Then I looked at him—really looked, the way I hadn't let myself since I woke up—and I took in the lines at the corners of his eyes.
It looked so authentic, nothing like makeup at all.
Could this really be a prank?
"Show me the phone," My breath began coming in ragged gasps.
He reached into his pocket and held it out without a word.
I took it.
The lock screen was bright and clear. The date sat there at the top, plain as anything.
November 2025.
I stood up so fast I nearly knocked the kit off the bed.
"Bella—"
"Don't 'Bella' me." I grabbed his arm with both hands. "Call Alex. Right now. I need to see him. Video call, I need to actually see his face."
Richard's expression did something complicated. A hesitation I didn't know how to read.
"What?" I demanded. "Why are you making that face? What happened to my son?"
"Nothing happened to him." He pulled out his phone slowly. "Alex is fine. He's at Columbia." He paused. "Our relationship is... complicated."
"Call him."
He called.
It rang four times. Five. I was already calculating whether I could physically reach through the screen and shake my child awake when the call connected.
The screen was dark. Just a voice, rough with sleep and thoroughly annoyed. "What."
My breath stopped.
That voice.
It was lower than I remembered. Deeper, with an edge to it I didn't recognize.
But underneath all of that—underneath the irritation and the sleep-roughness—there was something in the cadence that was completely, unmistakably Alex.
The same way he used to sound when I woke him up for school and he hadn't had enough sleep. That particular brand of grumpy.
My eyes went blurry.
Rustling sounds. A lamp clicked on. The camera tilted and then steadied, and I saw him.
He wasn't my five-year-old anymore. Of course he wasn't.
But the same jaw, same brow, Richard's eyes but with something of me around the edges.
His hair was dark and messy from sleep, and he was big now, genuinely big, broad through the shoulders in a way that made him look like a stranger.
But it was him. It was absolutely him.
"Alex." My voice came out wrecked. I didn't care. "Baby, it's me. It's Mom—"
His face went still.
He stared at the screen for a long moment. Then something shifted in his expression—something cold and sharp and furious—and he wasn't looking at me anymore. He was looking at Richard.
"Are you serious?" His voice dropped to something dangerous. "You called me at three in the morning to show me this? What the hell is wrong with you."
A short, ugly laugh. "You went and found yourself a replacement. You actually did it. You think that's okay? You think that's not the most disgusting thing you've ever done?"
The screen went black.
I stood there holding the phone, staring at the dark screen, and I couldn't move.
Yesterday. Yesterday morning—my yesterday, the only yesterday I had—he'd hugged me around the knees and said "bye Mama" when I left the house.
And now he was nineteen and he'd just looked through me like I was nothing.
The phone slipped out of my hands.
"He doesn't know me." The words came out flat, like I was reading them off a page. "He doesn't know who I am. My own son doesn't—"
The room tilted.
I sat down. Or maybe I fell. I wasn't entirely sure.
The edge of the bed caught me, and I pressed one hand over my mouth because I was going to cry and I didn't want to, I was so sick of crying.
But the image of Alex's face—the contempt in it, the complete absence of recognition—was playing on a loop and I couldn't make it stop.
This is real. It's actually real.
Fourteen years. I’d lost fourteen whole years with my husband and son.
The room tilted again, harder this time.
Richard's voice came from somewhere far away, saying my name.
I thought distantly that I should probably say something, that there were things I needed to ask him, things I needed to know, things I needed to fix—
Then nothing.
Alexander's POV
I threw the phone at the wall the second the call ended.
Then I picked up the lamp and threw that too, and the clock, and every book within arm's reach, until the floor was covered in debris and my hands were shaking and I'd run out of things to grab.
"A replacement." My voice was barely a sound. "He actually went and found a replacement."
I sank down against the wall and let the floor take my weight.
My right hand found my left wrist on instinct, fingers closing around the metal bracelet.
Mom had made it for my fifth birthday—braided wire with my name worked into the pattern in her careful, precise way.
Alex.
She'd spelled it out letter by letter while I sat on the kitchen counter and watched.
She'd explained what each twist meant, and I hadn't understood most of it but I'd understood that she'd made it for me specifically.
I'd worn it every day since. I'd never once taken it off.
"Mom." My voice cracked straight down the middle. "I miss you so much."
I pressed the back of my head against the wall and closed my eyes.
"Whoever you are," I said quietly, to the woman on the phone, to the city, to no one. "I will make you regret it."
I tightened my grip on the bracelet.
"I swear to God."
