The illumination from the gleaming lights atop the pearly hallway danced along the surface of the floor. With every step, my feet came down with the spring of determination, a simple tap-tap-tap growing closer to fulfilling intentions. It was the emptiness of the halls that first greeted me when I arrived at work first thing in the morning, but it wouldn't remain that way for long. I wouldn't rest until I finished what I set out to do.

It was a brand new day. A new day with the rebirth of old patterns. I had spent far too long suppressed in the shadows of someone I wasn't and it was right about time for me to claw my way back out. I almost couldn't wrap my head around the length of time that I had been silenced. That was over now. For the first time in a very long time, I could finally unfurl the part of me I'd tried unsuccessfully and stupidly to stifle and had become myself again. Saying it felt right was a vast understatement.

The words of Isabelle's letter burned into my memory. Lottie and Lyle's faces twist through my mind alongside it, and I thought of the truth that had hung over their subconscious long before it had hung over mine. The truth that they decided to hide from me for whatever ridiculous reasons. Suddenly, the image my mind put together of their faces felt a little more embarrassing to think about. I wasn't angry. That would have been wasting too much energy. I was enough of a strategist to retaliate in ways they could never comprehend.

I climbed the staircase to the second floor on my way to the break room, a place where Lottie and Lyle often enjoyed spending their time in the hour before work officially began. Words and schemes stirred to life in my mind, a sort of twinge of potential in my gut. They already had the information that I needed. I might have had the basics of the situation, but if it had taken me this long to figure at least that out, it wasn't going to be an easy task to pull out the rest of the story. I would need to choose my approach very carefully.

With a brief glance into the window to Lottie's office as I passed her door, I noticed that she wasn't at her desk. A sure sign that she was in the break room and likely that she was in there with Lyle. I continued on my way through the hallway, approaching the turn that would lead me where I wanted to go and absorbing myself in the temporary situation of my solitude. An almost salty, bitter feeling clung to the atmosphere, a sensation that snatched away one's breath and roughened the edges of one's mind with the unknown that lay so close. This day would not go forgotten.

The break room door swung back so abruptly at my push that it slammed against the wall. Lottie and Lyle, who had been sitting together in the violet chairs in the middle of the room and engaged in conversation, both jumped at the thud, eyes darting to meet mine. Lottie held a mug of tea between her paws that she had previously prepared for herself like she was trying to warm them up and almost seemed to cling to it tighter as she whipped around to face me in my entrance.

"Meet me in the conference room," I told them, coming to a stop near the chairs to address them. "I have something to say."

The door fell shut again as Lyle peered at me from behind his glasses, a look of warning plastered over his face. "Excuse me?" he said.

"I'm sorry, Digby," Lottie broke in before I had the chance to reply. Her voice had softened slightly in concern like she thought I would shout at her for speaking too loud and worry etched into her face. "Could you just give us a minute? We just need a little while to get ready, if that's okay."

"It wasn't a question," I shot back, already starting off on my feet again to make my way to the main conference room. If either of them respected me at all, they would be following.

As I had expected, I'd managed to draw both Lottie and Lyle into the conference room barely seconds after I had emerged by myself. I stood at the edge of the table where I would have sat in any other meeting and allowed them the time to find their own seats and get settled. I watched them as they set themselves down to listen to what I had to say, swiftly in their eagerness to follow my own directions. Having all of the power in the situation was an entirely new sensation for me. It was nearly electrifying, shooting through me with the sudden influence each one of my words held. I could definitely get used to this.

Just like that, Lyle and Lottie were both seated at the table where I looked down at them, hanging on to every word that would leave my mouth.

"I want to talk about Redd," I said firmly.

The statement lashed out in an instant reaction. Lottie reeled slightly as if the name had physically struck her, hastily glancing between Lyle and me as panic tumbled down onto her face. Lyle's paw quickly shot out in a gesture to settle the response as his focus was on her in a split second.

"Lottie, you can go back," Lyle assured her, and a pinch of anger flicked a nerve within me. When did I say for anyone to be dismissed? "I'll handle this."

"No," I snapped. Lottie's eyes turned to meet mine again, shimmering with alarm and helplessness. "She needs to be here for this."

Even Lyle was growing off ease at this point. Just the idea of Lottie sticking around to hear me rant about what Redd had done caused him to shift uncomfortably in his seat as he searched for the best thing to say. Though I could see the restlessness in his actions, his face showed nothing but bafflement.

"I don't understand," Lyle said after a moment. "What's all of this? What are you doing?"

"I think you do understand," I retorted, my focus flipping between him and Lottie, attentively taking in any shift in their expression. "I think you both understand. What I don't understand is how you think it isn't important for me to know that my sister replaced me with a criminal."

"Oh, that's what this is about. I knew this day would come," Lyle mumbled, reaching up and slipping his glasses from his face to run his free paw firmly over his eyes. "I thought she would have at least mentioned it to you. I really did."

"No, she didn't. She never tells me anything." The reminder of what Isabelle had put me through last year was resurfacing as I stood at the table, all of the angry words I had bottled up inside myself finally spilling out all at once. A scorching rage pulsed inside of me and my heart throbbed heavily in my chest. "And neither did you, by the way. You told me you didn't know why Lottie got sick. Why wouldn't you tell me what was going on from the start?"

"Okay. Calm down," Lyle urged. He had repositioned his glasses back on his face and held his paw out in the same gesture that had silenced Lottie's panic. Lottie, however, had only calmed down in sound as her frightened gaze locked speechlessly upon me. "Calm down. You're scaring Lottie."

And then my suppressed frustrations with Lottie came bursting out as well. "You're not in the clear yet, either," I rounded on her and she fidgeted with her paws distressfully in front of her. Her face was utterly deer-in-the-headlights at this point. "You knew about this longer than anyone and you didn't say a word of it to me. You know how I feel about him and animals like him and you didn't even think to tell me that my sister suddenly had these connections with him?"

Lottie seemed completely unable to even form a sound, so Lyle answered for her. "She can't even mention him by name, Digby," he pointed out. A slight edge had begun to skirt his voice—He could handle rudeness towards him, but as soon as someone disrespected Lottie, he was upset. "How do you expect her to tell you to your face that your sister who, might I add, you have your own set of trauma with, is meddling with him?"

"Well, she could have at the very least had the decency to let me know that my sister is in danger!" I countered sharply, causing Lottie to tense up in a notable flinch. She couldn't stand loud sounds, especially shouting. Lyle took notice of the response.

"I need you to stop," Lyle pressed. There was a look in his eyes that was as firm and unmoved as a stone. "You're being way too loud right now. Yelling isn't going to solve the problem."

Maybe he was right. Shouting only tended to shut animals down rather than to get them to talk. I set my weight onto my paws on the table, my shoulders hunching as I paused to catch my breath. After a few gulps of air, I could feel the grasp for volume my voice had taken slowly melting away, but my paws still shook with my hammering heart and the fury still pounded through my veins.

"Tell me what happened," I said at last, raising my head to look at Lyle.

Lyle wasn't entirely eager to let the truth slip, hesitantly sparing a glance at Lottie as she sat beside him in the image of terror before he began. "I don't know all the details myself," he confessed reluctantly, turning his focus back up to me. "But here's what I know. At some point Isabelle ran into him selling his art in the street and took a liking to him. They became close very quickly, which is always a bad sign on its own. There were animals in the town that tried to warn her, he's not good for you, he's dangerous, you need to get away from him, but she never listened. She was just so set on believing that she'd made a trustworthy friend to support her on her journey."

Isabelle's statements of how she had found a friend instead of work and how they had only known each other for a little while but she still felt like the friendship would last had begun to whirl through my mind. All this time, this was what was going on. Just the thought of her being trapped in a friendship with Redd himself sent my stomach curdling as my frustration boiled higher, ready to burst once more.

"On her birthday, Lottie wrote to her asking for any updates about her life in her new town, and that's when she told her," Lyle went on. "That's the letter you saw. The suddenness of it and possibilities of such a statement is what made Lottie sick. She told her why it was dangerous to be with him and urged how crucial it was that she escaped from that situation. I think she must have been in denial of the entire issue because we didn't receive another letter from her until the beginning of May. Lottie has been writing to her to try and help her get away from him but he won't let her leave."

Lyle paused again, slow to continue the story, and he pushed out a heavy sigh at the thought.

"From what Lottie tells me from the letters she's received, this has absolutely destroyed her," Lyle mumbled to the table. "She doesn't even have any hope for the future anymore. She's accepted the fact that her life will always be under someone else's control and that she failed to rescue herself before it was too late."

Isabelle. My own twin sister. The only animal I'd ever known to hold light in her heart and her attitude through every challenge and make it through with a smile. Once the source and inspiration for my own hope and light. Now finally beaten down by someone who left pain and suffering wherever he went. The fury was crushing now, beating and writhing against the casing of my chest in a desperate push to break free.

My voice trembled when I tried to speak. "How long has this been happening?" I asked shakily.

"Oh," Lyle muttered, stretching out the time for his answer as if he needed time to stop and think of his response. His gaze refused to leave the table in front of him. "Well, it has to be longer than a year by now."

A year. A year. More than twelve months of manipulation and deception before she was broken. My head spun so strongly that the room swayed. In a matter of moments, my entire motive had shifted to a single track of inciting violence and earning vengeance. In my head, the whole world was burning down around me and the feeling engulfed me fully, flooding my senses beyond all reason.

I had never hated Redd the kitsune more than I did in this very moment. I was going to find him. I was going to pick him out of the crowd. He might have thought that he was more powerful than anything, but that was only because he hadn't seen what I could do. His face was already crystal clear in my mind as my paws on the table twitched with the unsatisfiable urge for the harm I could achieve. For now, he might have been the one that animals feared. I would be the one who taught him to fear.

My head began to feel soft and fuzzy and warm as my focus rose to Lottie across the table. She was staring at me like she had heard the thoughts running through my mind, fright still fastened to her face. Like she wasn't the one who had put us in this situation in the first place. Obviously, she wasn't trying hard enough to free Isabelle with the attempts that Lyle described, given how the problem has dragged on for so long. Being the only one who was actually in contact with Isabelle, she held the most power in the situation, and still she blew it. My older sister was captured in the control of a criminal because of her negligence.

Without a second thought, I was in motion again, tugging my way past the table to reach her. The start into movement stirred an immediate reaction from Lyle and he rose to his feet just after I did.

"All right. We're done," Lyle said, but I didn't listen and closed in on Lottie as she sat in her chair. I hadn't even said anything yet and she was already slowly inching away closer to her uncle like she planned to slip off the chair and run, eyes slightly glazed over with fear like she wasn't quite present.

"How could you let this happen?" I shouted down at her. Lottie must have overestimated how much of the chair she had left as she lost her grip and collapsed down onto the floor, already scrambling back and away from me the second she hit the ground. I thrust the chair out of my way to follow her but she didn't have far to go, pressing her back to the wall behind her as I cornered her. "How could you do this to her? How could you do this to me?"

"Stop," Lottie pleaded, quickly shrinking against the wall as her paw shot out to keep me back. "Stop. Stop."

I had no intention of stopping. I wasn't even certain if I could stop. "Why didn't you say anything?" I burst out. My words clung to a fury so heated that it nearly burned my tongue to spit them out at her. Lottie withdrew her paw but only to slam them over her ears, frantic to block out the sounds. It was something I had seen her do before, several years ago, whenever her parents yelled at her for too long. "What made you think it was possibly a good idea to let this slide?"

Lottie couldn't give an answer this time. The ragged, uneven breaths she took told me that she had broken down into hysterical tears. She squeezed her eyes shut tight as her mascara spilled over and streaked down her cheeks, and her paws didn't budge from her ears. Another flash of anger surged through me—I needed answers, not hysterics.

Everything was happening all at once. It was like I was no longer in control, just watching as my own body took over. My paws snagged a fixed grip on her shoulders as they shoved her back into the surface of the wall to get her attention. Lottie instantly turned her face up again with teary, mascara-stained cheeks and rapid breaths, startled that I would make the move to hurt her.

"Answer me, otter!" I yelled right in her face, and just like that, everything snapped.

"STOP IT!!" Lyle's infuriated voice boomed throughout the room, shooting through my ears. In the vast difference from his usual soft-spoken tone, the piercing sound instantly jolted me back to reality. I had never heard him yell like that before. With the abrupt end in Lottie's tears as she gazed frightfully and silently up at her uncle behind me, it was clear that this was among the first times she had heard it as well. I shifted in my crouch to turn and face him, but before I had the time to even start, a sudden and rough grip on the back of the collar of my shirt yanked me up and off of Lottie.

Lyle had grabbed me by the back of the shirt, causing me to gasp for air for a moment as the fabric locked around my neck as I was being pulled from the ground, and only released me once I was standing but was quick to take hold of my arm instead. In hardly a second, we were moving again as he had begun to direct me hurriedly back towards the door with a rigid hold on my arm.

"You are eighteen years old. I expect you to act like it," Lyle muttered sharply as he steered me to the door. "You need to go home, calm down, and think about what you did. I expect you to change your behavior when you come back here tomorrow."

All words had escaped me. I opened my mouth to speak, but nothing came out. I could only allow myself to be dragged from the room in the silence that had once been filled by Lottie's frenzied tears.

The stale warmth of the mid-July morning sat dense in the air. I could hear the soft breeze toying with the leaves on the hedge walls and the grass from where I sat on the ground a few yards out from the door. I had first arrived at work maybe twenty or twenty-five minutes ago, but the thought of running into Lottie or Lyle didn't exactly spark any eagerness for me. I had at least found comfort in the summer warmth during my walk, and so I excused myself out to the garden at the back of the building to continue that sensation.

Comfort wasn't quite what I was feeling. Tears burned in my eyes as an ache of frustration seared my chest and my stomach twisted with discomfort. The longer that I sat there in complete solitude, the more words my mind screamed out at me. Monster. Stupid. Outcast. After the disquiet I brought, I really didn't belong here. Not with how easily I messed things up.

Maybe it was regret. Feeling everything too much or too little over the past year had really burned out my ability to pick apart my emotions. It was just life. I tore blades of grass from the ground one by one in silence, memories of the past event echoing in my mind. It was almost like the memories weren't my own, memories that I did not make and were instead thrust into my head for no clear reason. My fury had transformed me into an entirely different animal. At least I wasn't oblivious to the cause of that. If there was anything that life had taught me up until this point, it was that if I were to make my way in this world, I had to find a way to strengthen myself. Without my confidence, I couldn't possibly discover my strength. For what reason did I have to be that way?

The thought tightened the soreness behind my eyes, growing in threat to begin spilling down the tears. I passed a paw over my eyes to wipe away the dampness and felt my stomach clench. Anger resurfacing, or some kind of misery. What was wrong with me? How was it that I could never manage to break the cycle of sinking into a different side of myself and lashing out without thought only to wake up later on and despise who I had become?

I wasn't sure how long I sat there in the natural surroundings of the garden, hopelessly haunted by the actions that redefined me. Time remained unspoken as I sat until the reminder of starting my day slipped from my mind and a numbness crept up my back. The ripple of the wind across the grass was the only sound to accompany me for a large stretch of time.

I told Lottie that it was her fault, I remembered after a while. I'd gotten up in her face and demanded to know why she had caused all of this. But the truth was that it was far too beyond her control to make it her responsibility. Isabelle hadn't even told her what was happening until six months into their friendship, according to the letter she had sent, and even then she stood against her fears and nightmares to make things right. And I yelled at her for it while she was deeply sensitive to both raised voices and discussions of Redd. It was no question how she couldn't tell me herself with everything else going on in her life.

The sound of the door being pushed open from behind me snapped me back to my surroundings and out of my thoughts. I twisted around in my seat, mind reeling with what I possibly could have said to Lottie after everything that happened yesterday, but it wasn't Lottie who emerged out onto the grass.

"There you are," Lyle said, quietly shutting the door after him as a gentle breeze skimmed the grass again. Obviously, he was calmer than he had been before. "I was looking for you."

"Why?" I asked, but I couldn't keep my voice from breaking slightly with the teary emotion that had washed over me during my stay.

"I wanted to talk to you about something," Lyle told me. He left the doorway to step towards the bench positioned against the wall to the left of it and lowered himself into a seat. "Why are you sitting on the ground? Come join me on the bench for a while. It's better for your back."

There wasn't any use in protesting, so I climbed to my feet, brushed off any dirt that might have clung to my pants, and joined Lyle on the bench. Even now, I found myself sitting as far away from him as I could manage which, given the size of the bench, was eight inches away at best. He was calm and was likely going to stay that way if I cooperated—He knew how to keep his temper when he needed to—But the dreadful shout he had given stuck out in my memory.

Evidently, we shared the thought. "Digby, I want to apologize for what happened," Lyle admitted, shifting a little ways in his seat to address me. I couldn't read the emotion in his face. He seemed to be having a difficult time finding his words and was fidgeting slightly in a way that almost implied embarrassment. Was it guilt? That was something I rarely saw from him. "I was very rough with you and that wasn't right. I hope I didn't hurt you. I want you to know that I'm not proud of what I did, nor was I in a place to start yelling like that. I'm sorry for how I responded to the situation and I hope I can make it better."

A sense of fulfillment erupted within me at the sound of an apology, but it didn't lessen the sensation still tearing me apart inside. I avoided his gaze and didn't speak, examining my paws in my lap to excuse myself of an answer. My throat was thick and dry like sandpaper in the urge to break down in tears, though they were already near to springing back to my eyes.

"I understand if you don't want to see me right now," Lyle went on when I didn't answer, and out of the corner of my eye I saw him turn his face away. "We weren't getting along too well yesterday morning. I just wanted to come out here and talk about what happened."

When he looked at me again, I kept my eyes down and didn't do the same.

"I suppose I was hoping that I could help you understand where I was coming from by reacting the way I did," Lyle said. Another sweep of warm air fiddled with the grass at my feet. "I know that you were upset over the whole Redd situation and wanted to release that anger somehow and didn't really want to hurt Lottie. I had the intention of working through the situation in any way you needed but seeing you getting a little too aggressive with her just... I don't know. It set me off. I have to protect her, you know. I love her to pieces and if she gets hurt, I feel like I'm responsible for it."

At last, I raised my eyes to meet his at the unexpected display of emotion. I could nearly catch a shimmer of suffering in his dark eyes as they sat behind his glasses and he waited for my answer. He cared about Lottie more than anything in this world. The sounds of my shouts directed at her and the images of my paws shooting out and grabbing her shoulders still flashed through my mind.

"Did I ruin my friendship with her by doing this?" I asked weakly, but I wasn't entirely certain that I wanted to have the answer.

"Ruin? No," Lyle said, shifting in his seat again to lean forward and rest his elbows on his knees. "But you should definitely talk to her and make things right. She's very forgiving but also very protective of herself. If you leave your friendship hanging without saying anything about it, then yes, that will come to affect it."

A sob was bubbling up in my throat that I managed to gulp down again, but I couldn't restrain the tears from swelling in my eyes again. "I didn't mean for this to happen," I protested.

"I know you didn't, Digby. Honestly, if I found out something like this was happening to my brother, I'd probably react the same way," Lyle told me. He straightened up in his seat again, drawing in a slow breath, and offered a hesitant addition. "But I... Well, I don't think I would go after and try to stick the blame on someone who, um... Cares about me quite a bit."

Even though the statement was given to try and find some kind of light to make the situation more comfortable, the sob that I'd suppressed broke free from my throat, leaving me doubled over with my head in my paws. I gasped for air through strangled teary outbursts, struggling to find the breath to speak, and Lyle was silent beside me.

"I don't want to hurt her," I croaked out when I could force myself to speak. "I don't want to hurt anyone."

"I'm sorry. If I had known that would bring up some bad emotions, I wouldn't have said it," Lyle mumbled. After a moment, I felt his paw rest gently on my back as he tried to comfort me, but I shrugged away from his touch.

"Don't touch me," I muttered.

We sat in silence. The breeze continued to stir through the grass and the hedge walls in our lack of conversation. Even the summer heat was beating down on us more than before. I didn't raise my head from my paws as I cried, coughing between heavy sobs into my palms. In the absence of using my voice to talk, the urge to cry slowly diminished over several minutes, and then I was sitting with my elbows on my knees with my tearstained face in my paws without a sound.

"I figure you must be wondering why she got so upset so fast," Lyle mumbled beside me. My tears were long gone by now, but a void-like hollowness drilled into the pit of my chest. "If anything, I think this is a sign for me to tell you why that happens."

By the sound of that, I could tell that I was about to have information I didn't want to hear. I wiped the tears from my face, sniffling softly in what was left of my emotional breakdown, and finally looked him in the eyes to listen.

"Well, you know that she's sensitive to yelling and other loud sounds," Lyle went on. "I'm guessing a part of that is because she's not used to getting shouted at since she's pretty scared of doing something wrong. Unfortunately, she got a bit too much of that from her mom and dad when she was still living with them. They both had a lot of stress in their lives, not to mention their connection had deteriorated basically from the start. If there was one trait they shared, it was using shouting and blame shifting and all of that unhealthy stuff that meant anything that happened wasn't piling up on them. Lottie grew up learning to take that and now every time someone raises their voice for anything at all, she assumes she screwed up somewhere. That's why she freaked out when you started getting angry in general... That, and the fact that you said Redd's name to her face... And when you started yelling at her, she just completely shut down."

That was my reason to change. Any urge to cry within me was dissolving as my mind roughened at the edges as it had yesterday, thickening in strength as I faded into my sullen persona while Lyle spoke. Resentment clouded my mind yet again as I sat with my back straight and my paws twitching for violence but this time, it wasn't for Redd.

"But you should probably keep this quiet for now," Lyle advised after a pause. "She doesn't like talking about it or having animals know that about her."

So why are you telling me, then? I asked, but the words never left my mind as my eyes shot daggers at Lyle's back on his way back through the doorway to excuse himself back into the building.

. . .

At this point, the entire day could have been thrown away. It had already begun so terribly. But nevertheless, I had no other option than to pick myself up and carry myself through.

I didn't even get the chance to speak with Lottie at all as we failed to cross paths for the majority of the day. I didn't find her in the break room during breaks, didn't pass her on my way to and from Open Advisory or Studies, didn't even find her in the cafeteria at lunch. The only time we were actually in the same room together was during Happy Homeroom, and even then, she didn't speak to me in a way that wasn't in a strictly professional manner. I wasn't quick to assume that she was avoiding me, but I also knew well why she would have.

Despite our distance, thoughts of Lottie surfaced often during the day. Everything that Lyle had told me about her life years ago with her parents still spun through my mind. I kept hearing all of these things about how dreadful her childhood had been, but I never could have been able to tell with the way her smile lit up the room. Especially after what happened to Isabelle, I wasn't going to let anyone hurt her anymore. I just wanted to take her into my arms, absorb the warmth and sensation of being close with her, and block the world out. But now that I showed her something vastly different, it wouldn't be easy to find the words to express it.

After what felt like a thousand years, the workday was finally over and it was time to return home. The air was just as blazing as it was this morning as I emerged through the doorway onto the salmon-pink path, if not more intensely, but it wasn't as quiet as it had been when I had been sitting out in the garden before. A distant shout had pricked up my attention barely a few steps out from the door to find a considerable cluster of animals far down the path, too far to notice me but not far enough to prevent me from realizing what was happening. It appeared to be some kind of protest with animals calling statements of distaste and change at wandering visitors. Among several signs waving in the air, I managed to catch sight of the writing on one that paused long enough for me to read it. Take Down the "Happy" Home Academy, it spelled in broad, thick letters to promote its importance.

I left the building through the back route instead.