Chapter 557

Olivia

As I set the cups of tea on the table between us, the tiny tendrils of aromatic steam floated up into the air and partially obscured our faces from one another. Normally, the familiar scent of chamomile and honey would have been soothing, but not tonight.

Something about this sudden visit from Freya and Clarissa in the middle of the night left me uneasy.

“So,” I said, carefully sitting in the chair next to Nathan, opposite where Clarissa and Freya were sitting. “What brings you here?”

Freya and Clarissa exchanged a glance, a look of hesitant familiarity between them that further deepened my suspicions. Before they could answer, I blurted out, “Did you two discover that you’re related after all?”

Clarissa opened her mouth to respond, but then shut it again. Finally, with a nod, Freya spoke in her inner voice.

“I’m afraid I’m not quite sure where to begin,” she said, her fingers toying idly with the handle of her cup.

I parted my lips to reply, but the words seemed to catch in my throat. Thankfully, Nathan’s hand found mine, his touch grounding me as he spoke up instead.

“Was that you beneath the tree earlier today, Clarissa?” he asked.

Clarissa’s cheeks reddened, and she nodded.

Freya’s shoulders rose and fell with a heavy sigh. “I suppose there’s no easy way to say this,” she murmured. She lifted her gaze to mine, her expression inscrutable as ever. “Olivia, do you recognize this woman at all? On a deeper level, I mean.”

I blinked, turning to study Clarissa’s features more closely. Of course I knew her—we had come to know each other quite well over the recent months. And on a deeper level, yes, I knew her. But I didn’t understand why.

A frown creased my brow as I spoke. “On a deeper level… I suppose Clarissa and I have always had a sort of connection,” I mused, to which Clarissa silently nodded in agreement. “But…”

“I’ve always said that Clarissa looks like she could be Olivia’s mother. Other people have said the same,” Nathan added, glancing over at me. “That’s why we’ve all wondered if they’re related somehow.”

The words had scarcely left Nathan’s lips before Freya was shaking her head. “No, Olivia,” she said. “Clarissa doesn’t just resemble your mother. She is your mother. My sister. Giselle.”

A deafening silence seemed to descend upon the room after Freya spoke. For a moment, I thought that she must be joking, or that this was all some kind of elaborate prank, or even that I might be dreaming.

But as I looked back and forth between Freya and Clarissa and saw the somber looks on their faces, I knew that they were being utterly serious.

“But… that’s not possible,” I heard myself saying, my voice emerging as little more than a breathless rasp, accompanied by a wry chuckle. “My mother died years ago, when I was a kid. I was at her funeral, I watched them lower her casket into the ground. Even Nathan was there.”

I wildly looked over to Nathan then. His eyes were wide and disbelieving, but he said nothing at first. When he finally saw me looking, he swallowed hard and nodded in agreement.

“It’s true,” he said. “I attended Olivia’s mother’s funeral. There must be some sort of mistake.”

Freya sighed softly and took a sip of her tea before reaching across the table and giving my hand a reassuring squeeze—although the gesture was far from comforting right now. I felt as if I was on one of those prank shows on television, that hidden cameras would be revealed any moment now.

“Was it an open or closed casket funeral, Olivia?” she asked gently.

I opened my mouth to respond, to insist that of course it had been an open casket—but the words caught in my throat as memories of that waking nightmare resurfaced with gut-wrenching clarity.

It had been a closed casket funeral.

“N-No,” I finally managed to choke out around the enormous lump that had formed in my throat. “It… It was a closed casket funeral.”

“And why was that?” Freya’s voice echoed in my mind.

I swallowed, staring unblinkingly at Freya for a long time before I finally managed a response. The memories from those months came rushing back, memories that I had tried to push away; my mother’s frail body, her sunken cheeks, the dark circles under her eyes, her beautiful hair falling out in chunks until she finally shaved it off herself.

“My… my father should it was best if we keep her body private, to save her dignity,” I finally managed. “That it was better to bury her in peace, rather than allow everyone to look upon what the cancer had done to her body.”

As I spoke, I felt my shoulders begin to tremble. Nathan, still sitting in disbelieving silence beside me, suddenly wrapped his arm around my shoulders and pulled me close as a sob threatened to quake itself out of my throat.

“If this is some sort of joke, it’s not funny—” he began, but was cut off with a raise of Freya’s hand.

“I only have one more question,” she said, her eyes flickering with sympathy before she turned to me again. “Olivia… were you there the night your mother passed away?”

The sob finally bubbled to the surface this time, coming out choked and raspy as I tried to push it back down. I quickly wiped my tears from my eyes with my sleeve and shook my head.

“No. I wasn’t.”

Freya was silent for some time after that, and I was left alone with the swirling memories of the night my mother had passed away. She had died in a hospital a few towns over, in the dead of night. Not even my father was there.

He had never spoken about the way she looked when he got to see her body, of course. But I knew that it had been horrific. He had only looked at her for the briefest of moments before he had covered her face with the sheet again, unable to bear it.

After that, he had always said that it was best to remember her the way she was before; beautiful, full of life, with eyes that shined like stars in the sky.

Clarissa had been silent this entire exchange, her expression unreadable as she studied me from across the room. It was only when Freya prompted her with a gentle murmur of her name that she seemed to rouse herself, straightening imperceptibly in her seat.

“I didn’t die, Olivia,” she said, her voice cracking ever so slightly as she carefully spoke my name. “The truth is... I was taken.”

The room seemed to tilt on its axis as the full weight of her words slammed into me. Nathan tightened his grip around my shoulders, but I could scarcely feel it through the roaring in my ears, the thunderous pounding of my heart.

Somehow, over the rushing of blood and the spinning of my thoughts, I managed to latch onto the constellations of moles scattered across Clarissa’s cheek—the ones I had spent countless childhood afternoons tracing as I lay with my head in my mother’s lap, listening to her read aloud.

Clarissa... Giselle...

My mother was alive. This woman... this stranger whose visage had somehow been so achingly familiar since the moment I had laid eyes on her…

She was my mother.