“I always knew I loved him,” she murmurs, almost talking only to herself. “But it wasn’t the kind of love I thought I wanted. And I left him. I let him go.” She stares at our hands. “Maybe my brother was right and what I thought was love was just …” She doesn’t finish. “Maybe I just loved myself more.”

I don’t know what to do or what to say. It’s as if our roles are reversed and I’m the mother. I’ve never seen her like this, never seen her when she hasn’t been strong and in control. It’s terrifying to realize that even the strongest among us have such weakness.

She sighs. “I tried,” she says. “I tried to go back. So many times I tried. The people in town didn’t believe me when I told them I was from the Forest. They thought I was delusional. That I’d escaped from some pirate ship. They wouldn’t send anyone back into the Forest, and when I could finally go myself …”

Her voice cracks and she swallows a few times. “I lived here for years helping Roger protect the beaches and then I left. I thought I could forget and move on. But I couldn’t. The Forest kept calling back to me. And so I went back. I tried again. And that’s when I found you and I thought the Forest was telling me something. I thought it was telling me to forget about the past and concentrate on the future.”

As her words sink in her eyes snap into focus, widening so that the white surrounding the dark blue glows in the dusky light.

“When you found me?” My voice has no substance, as if it’s less than air. I feel as if I’ve somehow woken up in the middle of the night in a strange place and can’t orient myself, the shock pushing in like thick darkness.

Chapter 8

My mother swallows and her fingers close around mine as I try to pull away. “Gabrielle, wait,” she says, but I pull harder, wrenching my hand from hers.

“What do you mean, when you found me?” I ask, panic flooding through my veins, filling my lungs and choking me. I fall away from her, the damp sand soaking quickly through my skirt and chilling the skin at the back of my legs. Water splashes as she reaches for me but I keep backing away. Nothing makes sense and I shake my head, hoping to jostle the pieces back into place.

“Wait,” she says again, and I stop. Waves push and pull around us, slicing between us. I stare at her and she stares back. She holds her hand out to me the way she would to a skittish dog, and I realize how terrified I am of what she’s about to tell me. I want to tell her to stop, to forget this entire evening. But the demand won’t press past my lips.

“You were born in the Forest of Hands and Teeth,” she says finally, her fingers trembling in the air, salt water dripping from them like tears. “I found you there. You were lost and alone and seemed to be in shock and so I brought you home.”

“How?” I don’t even voice the question, just form the word with my lips.

“You were on the path.” The explanation pours out of her and I want to cover my ears and block what she’s saying but it comes too fast, like a wall of water I can’t run from. “I’d left Vista years before but I could not stop thinking about my village and so I decided to go back. I was going to look for them, look for the others I left behind. I found you and there wasn’t anyone else. You were a child—almost catatonic. I didn’t know what to do. I got scared and I ran.

“I didn’t have anywhere else to go and you were so sick and needed help so I came back to Vista. Roger, the old lighthouse keeper, had died the year before and I told the Council you were mine and that Roger had taught me how to run everything and that I’d take it over. No one knew you were not mine originally. No one but me.”

I stare at her dumbly and watch the drops falling from her chin, circles radiating where they hit the water.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” It’s all I can say, the only words I can pull from the whirl of my mind. Every memory, every moment in this town swims through my head and I can’t make sense of it.

She looks down at her trembling hand still hovering between us. “Because I didn’t want to remember,” she whispers.

Rage tears through me. “Then why are you telling me now?”

She lets her arm fall. The waves break around us; the last gasp of light loses its battle with the evening. “Because you’re right,” she says. “We are nothing more than our stories and who we love. What we pass on, how we exist … it’s having people remember who we are. We’re terrible at that in this world. At remembering. At passing it on. And it is not fair that I’m the only one who knows your whole story.”

I can feel every grain of sand pressing against my skin. I feel as though I used to be one giant whole and now I’ve been shattered to pieces and scattered into the night. There’s nothing strong enough to pull me back together again.

She leans toward me in the darkness, the absence of stars and light. “You’ll always be my daughter, Gabrielle. You’re the daughter of my heart.”

Her words strike like a fist against my chest, a brightness exploding inside me. I had another mother once. I belonged to someone else. Another woman used to comfort me. Another mother used to hold me when I cried and laughed.

I close my eyes. I try to remember her. I try to remember another life, another voice, another smell. But I see nothing.

I can’t remember any of it now. Only one thought begins to grow inside me, edging past the confusion and rage. “Who am I?”

She puts her hands on my feet, my legs, crawling to wrap her arms around my shoulder. I want to tear the feel of her from my skin. “You’re my daughter. You’re Gabrielle.”

“But I was somebody else once!” I scream the words, needing her to understand that she’s taken everything from me.

“No. You’ve always been my little girl.” I can hear her tears in the way her voice quavers. She draws in a shaking breath. “That’s what my mother used to call me. Her little girl. That’s what she said to me when she …” Her voice fades into the waves.

I press my palms to my eyes, disbelief and anger and confusion warring inside. “I was someone else’s little girl first,” I say, every muscle in my body pulling tight. I push away from her and stand up, the wet fabric of my skirt sticking to my legs. I stomp through the water in a tight circle, kicking against the salt spray, wanting to pull the world apart piece by piece.

“You were alone in the Forest,” she says. “There was no one there. I looked. You were starving and barely even conscious. You were only four or five years old! You didn’t even speak for a month after I brought you back and even then I wasn’t sure you were going to live! You could barely even tell me your name!”

I stop pacing. I stare at her. “My name?” I ask, dazed. I have nothing from my life before, not even something as basic as my name? I take a deep breath but I feel as though my lungs can’t hold the air.

“This … Gabrielle … it’s not my name?”

The moon is barely crouching over the horizon but even so I can see the pale echoes of it against her face. She looks both old and young at once and I wonder how I could have ever thought I was her natural child. My hair is blond, bleached almost white by the summer sun and hers is black, now streaked gray with age. Her skin is pale and mine is tan, her eyes dark where mine are light.

But who grows up challenging their own mother’s claim on them as a child? Why would I have ever thought I’m not who my mother told me I was?

She pushes herself up and comes to stand in front of me. “You kept saying something when I asked you but I couldn’t understand,” she whispers. “You wouldn’t tell me anything. I didn’t have a choice. I didn’t know what else to do.”

“Why Gabrielle?” I ask. It’s the only thing I can focus on as I try to reorder every memory of my life. As I probe the truth of everything my mother has told me.

My mother steps back, her mouth slightly twisted, as if she’s surprised at my question. “She was a girl I knew when I was your age,” she says slowly and quietly as if she can rebuild this bridge between us. “She was from the Forest like you, but no one knew where. And I was the only one who knew she’d come from the Forest.” Tears drip from her eyes. “She is the reason I escaped from my village. She is the reason I found the ocean.

“Listen, Gabrielle, I’m sorry.” She reaches for me but I step out of her grasp. “Please,” she says.

“No!” I shake my head. Too much is crumbling around me. Everything is too fast: Catcher’s bite, Cira’s sentence with the Recruiters and now this. Everything I’ve ever known has shifted underneath me and I don’t know how to stand straight anymore. “You should have told me!” I shout at her. “I had a right to know!”

“I thought it was best. I thought …” She swallows. “I thought that I’d lost everything else in the world and that somehow God was giving me something to hold on to. I thought … I thought He was giving me another chance to love.”

“You were being selfish!” I yell, the words raw against my sob-seared throat. “I didn’t belong to you. I was someone else’s daughter.”

“You would have died,” she pleads, holding her hand toward me. “I saved you.”

I push my fists against my head, wanting to yell and scream and shout. I know she’s right. I know that if I’d been left on that path something terrible would have happened. I could have been bitten and infected; I could have starved. But that doesn’t matter to me now. What matters is that she never told me any of this before this moment. That she probably wouldn’t have told me.

What matters is that she’s been lying to me my entire life. Everything I’ve ever known and thought about myself is wrong—fake. And I don’t know what I can trust right now, which makes me feel like I’ve been cast adrift. Shoved away from shore to battle the waves on my own.

I don’t know how to make her understand. “How can you tell me to let it all go? As if the past doesn’t matter?” I point at her, my finger shaking. “You want to just forget about what came before, but it doesn’t work that way. I can’t forget the people I loved and who loved me. Maybe you’re fine with taking what you need and forgetting about the rest. With leaving the people you love out in the Forest to die. But that’s not me. That’s not what life is about.” I’m left panting.

My mother’s cheeks are crimson against the white of her face, as if I’ve slapped her.

I swallow. I’ve pushed too hard. Gone too far. Lost control and let myself fall into my emotions.

I shove my fingers through my hair, pulling against my scalp. I don’t know how to make her realize how fundamentally this information changes everything about me and the way I’ve always known myself. I’ve always been Mary’s daughter. And I can’t stop thinking about who I am around Catcher—how he made me feel like I’m somehow important.

She’s taken this away from me. The hope that I can be more like her. The idea that something of her is in me.

The fact that I belong to her.

I step back with my hands up, as if I can push the air and she’ll be gone. “I’m not sure I can ever forgive you,” I tell her.

“Gabrielle,” she says, her voice low and even, her eyes narrowing slightly.

“No,” I say, shaking my head. “That’s not who I am. I’m not even sure that’s who I want to be anymore.”

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I love you.”

She waits for me to tell her I love her as well. She waits for me to forgive her. But all I can do is turn and run away down the beach. I’ve never hated my mother before and the feeling is like a pit of black nothingness collapsing me from the inside.

I keep going until I see the hulk of the Barrier looming in front of me. Lights bob along in the dark, the Militiamen on guard. My shoulders rise and fall as I stare at the wall and catch my breath. This is what it comes down to.

This is where it all began. If I hadn’t crossed it I’d never have kissed Catcher. I wouldn’t have known that he felt about me the same way I did about him. He never would have gotten bitten. I never would have talked to my mother about love and she’d have never told me the truth.

I wonder if she would have ever told me if not by accident.

I don’t want to face this. I don’t want to handle this. It’s too much and I need for it all to stop. I need to catch my breath and figure out what to do.

But the earth keeps spinning, the waves keep crashing, the lamp in the lighthouse keeps turning. Nothing stops just because I feel as though it should. Just because I’m lost.

Frustration bubbles through me. If only I could just curl up here in the sand. Bury in like a clam and forget. Not have to worry about these responsibilities.

I think about my mother and how she said life was so much easier after forgetting. But even as I try to push him from my mind I think about Catcher. I think about the roughness of his chin against my neck. I think about my promise to Cira to find him.

I hear footsteps approaching and I look up. Daniel and two other Militiamen walk toward me, lanterns held high in front of them, casting shadows against their cheeks and eyes. I see the moment when Daniel recognizes me, the way his eyebrows rise and his steps falter. He reaches out a hand to me as the other Militiamen fade back.

“Gabry,” he says, his tone concerned. But my name on his lips is a lie—my name is nothing anymore. It doesn’t belong to me, and I push against the Barrier and run away down the beach.