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I blink. I was about to ask if I could get them something from the cafeteria downstairs; if they can eat an ice cream sandwich, maybe, with their mouth in the state it’s in. Now that Mom’s dead and I don’t know when I’m getting the trust, if ever, I have to be careful with my money, but a few dollars feels like a small price to pay if Mrs. Keating hasn’t been doing jackshit.

I say, “What?”

Felicity just …

Collapses.

There was never a podcast. They deleted all the voice recordings they took of me. They’re sorry they tried to hurt me. They’re sorry they hated me so much for so long. They’re sorry they blackmailed me, and they’re sorry they lied. It’s that their head was in the Saw trap, and they didn’t know mine was, too. They missed their sister, and they were scared, and they didn’t want to be sent back to their first family, and everything hurts and they’re having to relearn how to swallow and they can’t talk right and they sound so stupid.

“Do you hate me?” they ask between gasping sobs. “It’s okay if you do. I hate me.”

I realize I’ve been standing by the wall, unmoving, the whole time. That’s what I do when people get emotional. I stand there. Or I say something to get them to stop, even if it’s mean, because it freaks me out. I don’t like it.

It’s a pretty glaring character flaw of mine.

“No,” I say. “I don’t hate you.”

“What?”

I shrug. “If you want me to hate you, you’re going to have to do better than that. The bar’s pretty high these days.”

With that, I produce a small envelope from my hoodie pocket. It’s one of Hetty’s—she uses them to mail birthday checks to her nieces, or whatever else old people do with envelopes. I taped it shut and wrote Felicity on it with Sharpie.

I hand it to them.

“This is yours,” I say.

Felicity blinks at me with their tear-filled eyes, clearly confused, but they take the envelope anyway, jamming a shaking finger under the tape.

Inside are Cordelia Sutherland’s belongings.

“Oh my god,” they whisper.

First they pull out the driver’s license, which they raise up to the ugly white lights of the hospital room as if making sure it’s real. Their sister’s expressionless face stares back at them, along with her name, and her signature, and all the little details that do their best to add up to a real person. Her height, and weight, and the color of her eyes.

Then the photo. Crinkled at the corner, color flaking off where it’s bent and creased over the years.

“This was my eighth birthday,” Felicity says, holding it close to inspect every detail. “The last one I had at home. The day after this, we were—we were in a motel. She got me a Barbie and dyed my hair to match hers. That was my present.”

“Hopefully she did a better job than you do,” I say. “Your roots are awful.”

That gets them to laugh, though it looks like it hurts.

“And you …” they say. “You didn’t show anybody?”

I hesitate.

When the social workers brought me home to pack a bag, the driver’s license and the photo were the first things I grabbed. And the first night I spent sleeping in their office—making a bed under the conference table and stealing coffee from the break room—I thought about it. How much damage could these items undo, now that they were finally in my hands? How many sins could I wash away if I showed them to the world? What I did to Daniel? What I did to Mom? What I did to Cordelia Sutherland, and everyone else?

On that floor, I came to the same conclusion I did in Daniel’s apartment: I can’t do it. It won’t undo what Dad did to me, and it won’t bring Cordelia back from the dead. Sure, maybe it would change a few people’s opinions of me, but it wouldn’t be worth it. I won’t destroy Felicity for this. I’m better than that.

I am. I am better than that, I swear. Because I didn’t look at Mom’s body on the powder room floor and feel good. I didn’t enjoy it, not like Dad did when he looked at his victims. I’ve been so hurt and so scared for so long, and I was forced to do awful things, and it’s obliterated the wiring of my brain. I’m not irredeemably evil, just fucked up. It’ll take years to undo all the damage, if not decades, but—

“Of course I didn’t show anybody,” I say. “I’m not my father.”

It’s the first time that I’ve said it and believed it.

Now I’m crying, too.