Cece goes very still. Thomas leans forward, his elbows on the table, thumb and forefinger pinching the bridge of his nose. Above us, a mockingbird flutters from one tree branch to another, too busy being a bird to realize the universe-shattering news that was just delivered to us. I wonder if birds ever feel like their universe has been shattered. Probably not, because even if their home gets chopped down for firewood, at least they can fly to another one.

Cece stares at Thomas. Or Joseph, but I can’t see myself ever calling him that. If she’s shocked or confused like I am, she’s not showing it. She’s fallen into that stoic silence, where I’m never sure if she’s thinking too much, or not at all. The silence stretches on for a full minute and when I can’t take it anymore, I have to say something.

“Why would you go by a different name?”

Thomas bites his bottom lip. Every word he’s said to us seems forced out against his will, so it’s not a surprise when he takes forever to answer me. Maybe he has all the time in the world, but we have a home to get back to. One we haven’t ran away from to start a fake new life. Thomas takes a deep, shoulder expanding breath, like the ones our therapist has taught Cece to use when she’s feeling overwhelmed. I wonder if he remembers the therapy. If he remembers anything about the old life he left behind. “I’ll explain it all, but how did you find me?”

“I’m your sister,” Cece says. “I knew you weren’t dead. I never believed it. That’s how I found you—intuition.”

“Seriously,” he says, leaning forward, his eyes shifting from her to me and Ezra and back. “What was it?”

“You visited your old house,” I say. This could go on forever, this little standoff war of semantics with Thomas and Cece. I need it to end, now. My own anticipation can’t take it anymore. “We saw the bottle of cologne on your dresser. It had been moved.”

“And that led you to me?” He turns away and covers his mouth with his palm. “A moved bottle of Coolwater.” He sits up straighter, gazing around the baseball field as if he can’t believe what he’s seeing. Can’t say I blame him. Cece did some top level CIA type stalking to find him.

“I knew you had been there, so I went to Google Maps,” Cece explains. “Your Jeep was in our driveway on the street view. That led me to an internet search and Big Al’s Used Cars, and Chell Wheatley, and then pictures you posted of your Jeep in front of your apartment. The Internet keeps the EXIF data of a digital picture, you know. Unless you strip it first, which you didn’t.”

“Holy shit,” he mutters.

“Yeah,” Ezra says sarcastically. “Lilah and I thought the whole thing was bullshit, but Cece doesn’t screw around with her intuition. She wasn’t going to stop until she found you.”

“It was also Lilah,” Cece says, turning to me. “She helped me. She believed me when she didn’t have to.”

I’m not sure if this is forgiveness, but it feels like it. The time we lost will never be found again. But even if it takes five years to do the right thing, at least you did it, right? At least I did it.

“So spill it, you jerk,” Cece says, leaning back a little. She’s still sitting on her hands, probably so she won’t unleash more punches. “Who are you and why did you leave?”

Thomas laces his fingers together on the table then pulls them apart, moving his hands to his lap. “When I was six years old, I was told I could never say my real name again. So, I didn’t. Not until just now.”

“Man, you need to explain a little quicker,” Ezra says. “I’m freaking out over here.”

Thomas nods, then pulls his teeth under his bottom lip. “Cece,” he says, reaching out a hand across the table. She doesn’t take it. He exhales slowly. “What’s the earliest memory you have of me? Lilah? What’s yours?”

I shrug. “How would I know? We’ve known each other our whole lives.”

He shakes his head, an ominous movement more than a disagreement. “You’ve both known me since you were four. That’s when Mom and Dad took me in, and later they adopted me.”

I think back, flipping through memories of every Christmas and birthday party and all the days Aunt Summer babysat me at Cece’s house. When is my first memory of Thomas? In my mind, he’s always been there. Just like my parents and my grandparents and Mr. McMann next door. The older people in my life have always been there, like oxygen and sleep and the sun rising in the morning.

“You were at Big Brother Camp,” Cece says after a long moment. “Mom and Dad told me my big brother was at camp and he was coming home. I remember thinking that was weird.”

I don’t remember any of that, but Thomas nods. “You had just turned four. I was really happy when they took me home with them,” he says. “They had a nice house and it seemed like nothing bad ever happened there.” He smiles at the memory. “And nothing bad ever did happen, until the car wreck. It was a good family.”

“I don’t understand,” Cece says. “Why wouldn’t they have just told me that? Why adopt a child and make up a lie that you’d been at a fake summer camp so I’d think you were my brother all along?”

“It’s not as easy as that,” he says, tracing the etchings in the picnic table. Over the years, a lot of couples have used this table to declare their affection with a pocket knife. Some who weren’t as lucky in love as others simply drew designs, while others carved out the names of people who “sux”.

Thomas gives us that warning look again. “What I’m about to tell you can never be spoken about, ever. Not for the rest of your life.”

“What about my—” I begin, but he cuts me off with a sharp glare. “Not your parents. No one. Promise me.”

“I promise,” I say, because the desire to know the secret is more overpowering than the guilt of keeping something else from my parents.

“Promise,” Ezra says beside me. Thomas turns to Cece.

“Why would I share your secret?” she says. “You should know me better than that.”

He swallows. “I was born to bad people. They weren’t just shit parents, they were also a part of the mafia. Not the glamorous stuff you see on TV, but the part that wasn’t doing so well with the heroin turf wars in the Bronx.”

My eyes nearly bug out of my head. That kind of thing is something you hear about on a special edition news broadcast, or see sensationalized in a movie. It is not real life. Not my life, anyway.

Thomas continues, “One day my dad gave me a package and told me to take it to school and hide it where no one would find it. It wasn’t a bunch of clear bags of white stuff like his usual packages. It was a black box, velvety on the outside, and inside it had a ton of diamonds. I found out later they were stolen from the five families as retribution for some deal gone wrong years ago. They knew my dad took it. They killed my mother, and then they killed him, but not before getting him to confess that he gave the diamonds to me.”

Thomas is a Texan through and through. He raised rabbits for 4-H in sixth grade, and he went camping with the boy scouts every year. I can’t imagine him living in the bustling big city of New York, not even as a kid. All of this is a little hard to take in. Beside me Cece shifts on the wooden seat.

“So what happened?” she says.

“A nosy landlord overheard the whole thing. Apparently, he was in the next apartment fixing the plumbing or something, and the walls were thin. Usually people didn’t snitch on stuff like that, but he went to the cops. These FBI agents came to my school and yanked me out of class, and put me in a black SUV. They asked where I hid the diamonds before they even told me my parents were dead. But I wasn’t a snitch, so I didn’t tell them. I pretended I had no clue what they were talking about.”

“Shit, man,” Ezra says under his breath.

Thomas gives a little shrug. “My parents weren’t good people. They were always drunk. They left me at home alone constantly. I’d seen my mother having sex with multiple men long before I even knew what sex was. When the police took me, they saved my life and they gave me a new one. Witness Protection.”

His lips quirk to the side. “You think therapy with Aunt Carol is bad? Try being six years old and going through the witness protection program’s therapists. I was practically threatened to be killed if I ever told anyone who I was. They let me pick my new first name. I chose Thomas because it was the first name of my favorite teacher, Mr. Marcum. When they decided I was finally brainwashed enough to never tell anyone about my past, I was taken in by a foster family—your parents,” he says to Cece.

“But they quickly adopted me and I became your big brother. I loved my new family so much that most of the time, I forgot I even had a past. It was just me, Mom and Dad, and my cute little sister. I loved the life I had with you guys.”

Cece’s lips waver, and a tear rolls down her cheek. “They never acted like you weren’t their own. You’d think there would be some kind of hint, something that made this make sense.”

He nods. “I know. They were the best surrogate parents ever, Cece. I miss them every day.”

“So why did you leave?” Ezra’s clearly not as impressed with Thomas’s story of his horrific past. “Why’d you let us all think you were dead? Do you know how hard that was on us?”

“I’m sorry, man. I am. You have no idea how many times I wanted to reach out to you guys. But after Mom and Dad died—” He stops and takes in a deep breath, letting it out sharply. “After I lost my second set of parents—my face was all over the news, man. It was everywhere. People were setting up fundraisers for the two kids who lost their parents. We were on the internet and the local news. It was hell. Even though I had adapted to my new life and mostly forgot about the old one, seeing my face the day it made the national news was the last straw. If the mob was still looking for me, they’d know it was me. You can change your name and cut your hair and move to the bottom of the country, but birthmarks don’t lie.”

“So you faked your own death,” I say.

He turns his palms up. “I faked my own death.”

“You shot yourself?” Cece’s eyes widen. “Where?”

He grins and lays out his arm on the table, pointing to a jagged scar across his bicep. “I cut myself with a pocketknife and let the blood drip everywhere. I was hoping it’d look like I got stabbed and thrown over the bridge.”

“But there was a bullet casing on the scene,” Ezra says, lifting a brow.

Thomas shrugs. “Happy coincidence.”

“How the hell did you pull this off?” My voice doesn’t sound like me because I’m so stunned I’m surprised I’m still breathing. This entire story is so surreal; the last five years of thinking my cousin is dead, it’s all a little too much to process.

“I had two hundred dollars in birthday money. I went straight to New York City, found my diamonds, and sold some to get the hell away from there. I didn’t know where to go, and Texas was all I knew, so I thought I’d hang low for a while and figure it out. I bought my Jeep, and then I found an apartment in the ghetto with this old man landlord who didn’t verify how old I was, so long as I could pay the rent on time.”

Overhead, that bird calls out to its bird friends. There’s a few of them fluttering around in the tree now.

“I went to Florida for a little while, but that place is stupid hot. Ultimately I kept coming back to Texas because I wanted to be near you guys. I’ve dyed my hair a million different shades just to seem like a different person. Then I met Robin. She’s in school to be a professional makeup artist. I told her I’m embarrassed of this thing,” he says, pointing to axe shaped birthmark on his temple. “So she covers it up with makeup when we go out.”

“Does she know?” Cece says softly.

He shakes his head. “She doesn’t know a thing. It would implicate her. It’s implicating you guys, too. You can’t know about this at all. Just forget all about it when you leave, okay?”

“So that’s it?” Cece says, slapping her palms down on the table. “You tell us about your secret life and then we have to go back home and pretend it never happened? I have to march through each shitty day of my life acting like my brother is dead?”

“You have no idea how badly I wanted to see you again,” he says. The corner of his eyes crinkle in pain. “But I stayed away to protect you.”

“So now you get to live with a pretty girlfriend having a fun life and I get to stay at home having experiences that make me cry at night because I think my brother is dead and he’ll never know about them? I have to wrap presents for people on Christmas knowing I can’t get you anything? That’s how this is going to be?” Her voice cracks and Thomas’s shoulders fall.

“Cece…I’m so sorry. I don’t know any other way to do this.”

It’s a miracle that Thomas is alive and breathing and right in front of me, but I find myself looking at Cece most of the time. I can feel her pain, sense the betrayal she can’t seem to shake. She watches her brother with a look of pain, love, and regret. Then she pushes off the picnic table and runs back to the Jeep.

“You okay?” Ezra calls out and Cece nods. She grabs her backpack from the cargo area of the Jeep and produces that pink notebook she’s had with her this whole time.

“I want you to have this,” she says, presenting the sparkly, slightly beat up spiral notebook to Thomas. “It’s everything you missed. Good things, bad things that happened. All the stuff I wished I could have told you but couldn’t because you were gone. I kept track of it for when I found you again.”

Thomas’ lips press together, making his smile look more like a frown. He takes the notebook, running his fingers down the cover. “Thank you.”

“So this is it?” Cece says, one hand on her elbow, her eyes watery. “We have to leave now?”

“This is it,” Thomas says with a nod. “Look, I—” He rubs his forehead so hard the skin crinkles up. “I’ll find a way to keep in contact, okay? Something secret and untraceable. We just have to be careful.”

Cece grins. “All of my contact info is in that notebook.”

“Great.” Thomas stands and comes over to our side of the table. He holds out his arms for a hug, and for a small moment I’m afraid Cece might stop herself from going to him. The pain is slicing through all of us, after all. 

But even if he’s not her brother, he’s still her brother, and she knows it as much as I do.

I let them hug and then I join in, wrapping my arms around both of them. Ezra does the same, and we all laugh at this spectacularly awkward embrace. None of us are supposed to be here right now because life isn’t supposed to be this way. It shouldn’t be filled with horrors and secrets and loved ones taken too soon. But it is. So we hug.

But we don’t let go for a long time.