She wasn't gone. My best friend was never gone. She was right here all along. I stared at her like I was seeing her for the first time.

But how?

"Cindy?" Her name exploded on my lips. It was frantic, exhilarated. "Cindy," I repeated in a scratching whisper, and it was no longer a question. It felt like I just needed to say it, to pair the two together. Face and name. Unlearning and relearning.

Her face was different—the jawline was a soft oval instead of angular. Her hair was different—it had mousy brown undertones instead of a rich, confident blonde. Her eye color was different, too—a deep, warm hue of Bambi maroon instead of her former seductive pools of blue. Everything was different, but I knew it was Cindy. Every carefully curated detail that defined Beverly dissolved, and in their place, unmistakable, was my bestie. She was older, scarred, but褶undeniably her.

"Rhi, you know?" she stuttered. "That I'm your..."

"Yes," I sniffed.

Cindy's eyes glittered, staring into mine, the moonlight picking out the same silver in our skin. The question peeled off my tongue, dropping to my gut like a dime down a well. There were no wishes to be found here. All I could find instead was: "All this time?"

I did not know what to say—I thought you might have been dead did not even scratch the surface of what was going on in my mind. In a way, maybe she was dead. Cindy had reinvented herself—hiding in plain sight. It all made sense now: Beverly discovering the hideout that only Cindy and I knew about; Beverly's Tolkien jacket patch; that same tight-lipped smile my bestie had; and the reaction of Cindy's dog, Coco, upon seeing Bev for the first time. The funny thing was that no one but me, her best friend, would have been able to discover and recognize her. Had I not returned to Gaffney, had I not noticed the strange markings on my father's face, none of this would have ever been revealed. Cindy would have remained Beverly forever.

We just stared at each other for a beat. I waited for the falling sensation, to be yanked out of sleep and wake up in my bed in a cold sweat, thinking, What a wild-ass dream. My face rearranged itself, my mouth moving around unspoken words. But then I did speak them.

"What happened to you? How did you disappear? Reappear?"

"I was twelve the first time Heathcliff slapped Darlene—Mom—for the first time," she said. "I threw a glass at him, and I don't even know if I succeeded; the second the glass left my hand, he had me pinned on the floor. One of his arms was as big as my entire body. It hardly seemed fair how easily he kept me down, like I was a rag doll. The more I fought to get away, the worse he pushed."

A tear snaked down my cheek. I pulled my legs in so I was sitting pretzel-style, listening intently. Whispers of Mom and Tom's animated chatter came from downstairs as Beverly-Cindy told her story.

"Home was unbearable. School was unbearable. Love was unbearable. Everything—until Victor came into my life as a saving grace."

I started shaking my head in earnest when she interrupted me.

"I know. I know he didn't love me. Not really. He just... told me what I wanted, what I needed to hear the whole time. He lied too easily, the words rolling off his tongue. Maybe because he had been practicing all his life. On your mom, on Tom, on you. On all his other lovers. He knew how to push the right buttons with people."

"How long did it... your affair. How long did it last?"

"Not very long. Some months after it started, a bit before I was supposed to go to college, I got pregnant." She moved her hand to her belly protectively.

So Mrs. Robinson was right. Cindy was pregnant, just not with some local boy such as Joshua Wilkins or Ethan Chang. She got pregnant with my father's child.

"Did you have the baby?" I whispered, even if deep down inside I already knew the answer.

"No. He... Victor paid for the abortion and, shortly after, washed his hands of me. Both my parents knew. Little Roxy had no idea. Heathcliff was so ashamed of me. After I aborted Victor's baby, my father beat me up regularly. Bible Belt and all that. The whole summer and the better part of September were hell on Earth. I stopped leaving the house altogether."

That was around the time when Cindy started avoiding me. I understood why now. But who could have imagined something like this?

"I couldn't even grieve the loss of my baby properly, or acknowledge its existence. That's when I decided to run away from home. I moved out of Gaffney around the same time as you did, actually."

I allowed myself a small smile.

"I didn't want to be marked for life, Rhi. I didn't want to keep living in pain. My father always used to say: Pain is a teacher of life. Pain will set us free. But I knew that was bullshit. Pain isn't supposed to teach you anything. It only exists to hurt you. It was then when I grew to realize that... only if I went someplace else, became someone else, could I truly be free. Can you understand that?"

Oh, I could understand that all too well.

"I didn't go far, not at first," Cindy said in her familiar lilt, the carefully cultivated Beverly-accent slipping away with every word. "New York. I just... disappeared there. I worked as a waitress in some dive, living off the grid. I was just trying to save enough... enough to change." She gestured vaguely at her face and her hair. "The plastic surgeries... they cost everything. Every penny I scraped together. I had to become someone else. Someone he wouldn't recognize. I also got contacts." She touched her eyes. "Everything had to be different. Cindy... she had to vanish completely."

A shiver ran down my spine.

"When it was all over, I got the new ID and passport. Then, I went to LA," she continued. "I tried to start over. To be Beverly. Studying interior design... it was a way to build something new, something... clean. But I couldn't let Victor go. I would look at his socials. Just... watching. It was like a sickness." Her eyes finally met mine, and there was pure hatred in them. "He did this to me, Rhiannon. He took everything. My life. My home. My family. My face. I had to leave. I was exiled, but not by choice. I had to become someone else because of him if I was going to be happy. Except that I couldn't."

I knew home. Home was Eli tucked into the corner of my basement couch, a Twizzler hanging out of his mouth, arguing with me about whether it was an unfair advantage for me to use Kirby in every Smash Bros.match. Home was Mom surprising me with a rainbow Italian ice when I came back from school. That autumn of 2015, both my bestie and I lost our hometown.

"It's all my fault, Cindy." Tears rolled down my face.

"Your fault?" Beverly-Cindy's eyes flashed.

I gnawed the inside of my cheek and looked up at her. "We should have never left you there all alone. Eli and me. Dammit, I remember calling you the next morning. You weren't answering your phone and, later... you grew distant with both of us. I should have realized something was seriously wrong. It wasn't your usual behavior."

"Don't beat yourself up about it, Rhi. You couldn't have known. I should have told you. I wanted to tell you, but I was so embarrassed. I mean, how do you confess this to your best friend: Hey, by the way, I'm a homewrecker who is sleeping around with your dad, the town magnate? Then the pregnancy and the abortion made everything worse, and I just wanted to leave altogether."

I swallowed hard. "Then how did you decide to come back to Gaffney?"

"Like I told you, I couldn't let go of him. The very thought that he was here, living his best life, haunted me. I wanted my revenge. I wanted Victor to suffer. So when I returned three years ago, the first thing I did was rent a room and approach Tom. In the beginning, it was only to get a job at Victor's company and try to sink his business from the inside."

"But?" I prompted her to continue.

"I fell in love with your brother. He was always so caring with me. He gave me the kind of treatment I never had before. And then, this little gift from God came into our life." Cindy hugged her bulging belly. "I thought I was given a second chance. I thought that I found a safe haven again. Tom and I even talked about buying our own house, and I stopped caring about revenge. Victor was old and buried in work. He had a new lover, too..."

"Aubrey," I sighed.

"Yeah. I grew to love your mom like my own. When I would go to the mall with Lorraine, I would sometimes bump into my mom and Roxy, and I was happy to see them, but of course, I couldn't tell them it was me. I listened to the stories about you, hoping I would get to see you again one day, even as Beverly. And that day came."

"Why did you do it?" I asked her in earnest, and we both knew what it referred to.

"I thought I was safe," she whispered. "That I had built a new home, the home I had always dreamed of. But I wasn't. One night, two weeks ago, when Tom was away on a business trip, Victor came into my bedroom. I still remember how hard I pushed him away. I said, Get the hell off me, and the voice didn't even sound like mine. It belonged to the ugly thing that lived in me. The creature that goes berserk when it's cornered. It was a creature I hadn't seen since I left."

"What happened?" I patted her hand.

"Victor didn't want to let go, not until I threatened that I would scream. He didn't manage to force himself on me, but he did leave me with some nasty bruises on my neck. I still wear a scarf because of them."

And I had thought Tom did that to her. My blood boiled in anger.

"The worst part was... that he didn't even know I was Cindy. I was just another young woman for him to seduce, to sample. And just like that, the feeling of a safe haven was gone. I wasn't sleeping at night, in case he tried something again. I purposefully avoided being caught alone with him in the same room. But it was torture. It was a game of nerves, and one I knew I would soon lose. When Victor Carmichael sets his eyes on the prize, it's only a matter of time before he gets what he wants."

I could almost see the perverted glint in my father's eye. I knew how his mind worked; he was figuring out a way to have her for himself.

"So I thought to myself: nice girls are always the ones who get hurt. It's like the universe gets some sort of perverse pleasure out of taking out the nice girls one by one. And I was done with being a nice girl. The only way to get rid of him for good was to... to kill him." She spoke her confession out loud.

I gnawed the inside of my cheek until I tasted blood.

"You know, I never knew I was capable of it. It led me to think: is it possible to know—like, really know—another human being, or even ourselves?" Cindy said, her voice dropping to a church-confessional whisper.

I could feel it: the red splotches coming to my face, the tightness in my throat from trying not to cry.

"You are either a villain or you are a victim, and I just did not want to be the victim anymore. I couldn't. Not again. Not again. I got the mushrooms from Lorraine's garden. I made sure only Victor's plate contained the Funeral Bell. And you know what? Some hours later, I went in there, to his study. I went in there to see him die."

I sat back, my hands balled together in my lap, pressing against my stomach, kneading the knot. The knot outgrew my gut all at once, winding up my spine, python-strong.

"I was surprised at how quickly the mushroom soup worked on Victor. He had already been on the verge of passing out from how much he had to drink. It was easy. The choice between my escape and his life wasn't even a choice. And then I told him."

"You told him you were... Cindy?"

"Yes. And he said to me, he said, You don't know what you're doing, Cindy. For the first time, there was actual fear in his voice. You never get what you deserve, I told him. And I'm so sick of it. He begged me to help him, to call the doctor, in that frail, pathetic old man moan. But I didn't help him. I didn't. I thought he deserved to die. For what he did to Tom, to you, to Lorraine, to me. I didn't want him to get away with it this time."

"How did you feel when... when it was all over? When he died?"

"I didn't feel better. It was a small comfort. I'll have to live with the truth living in me like a cancer. The truth of me being a murderer." Cindy started crying.

I hugged my knees to my chest, wishing I could disappear. It just felt wrong being a voyeur to her devastation.

"So what happens now? Are you going to turn me in?"

"No," I said, and as the word formed on my lips, I knew it was going to be my final decision. "Look, Cindy." I took hold of her shoulders, gentle but firm. "I think you've been through something horrible, something unbelievable, which makes it hard to believe."

"I still deserve to go to jail. Do you think doing something shitty is less shitty if you really believe you had no other choice?" Cindy stood up, wobbling on her heels like a newborn giraffe. "Don't you realize what I did? I didn't belong in this family at first. I just... carefully planted myself here, like a cuckoo egg waiting to hatch. I... I fucked up so bad," she whimpered, and then she hiccuped.

I cut her off by saying her new name. "Beverly, look, it's not your fault. He was so much older... Beverly, you understand what happened to you when you were eighteen, right?"

The whistle of the wind in the trees outside the window filled the silence in the room. I wanted to give her more time. We had to decide these things together, as a family. We had to make our choices, to undo all the ones made for us. Perhaps we could fix the holes in our lives by shifting, by rearranging.

Her face was tilted downward, a choppy curtain of hair falling over her bare shoulder. The moon streaming through the window created a prism, bathing Cindy-now-Beverly's face in silver light. She was beautiful. We both changed—the two sides of the same coin. We were the same essence in a different shell, an unwitting caterpillar and a strong butterfly that bloomed into the best version of themselves. Sometimes you have to allow yourself to be weak for a while before you can return strong.

Cindy fell into my arms, sobbing on my chest. I silently picked up the brush and began working at her tangled ends. She sat, staring into the mirror, tears rolling down her cheeks as her bestie—her little pain-in-the-ass bestie—braided her hair with all the care and tenderness in the world, just like she used to do when they were little girls. Before the world happened to them.

"So, Eli Kane again, huh?"

I burst into laughter. I did not know what I was expecting her to say, but it wasn't that. Still, I was confident enough in what Eli and I had once more to answer with a smile. "Yep. Him again."

"What are those?" Beverly asked my mom when we came down the stairs, holding hands.

A mutual agreement passed between Mom and me with a single glance.

"Brown butter shortbreads," Mom answered in her dreamy voice.

I flipped one of the cookies, realizing with disappointment that, because Tom was helping Mom instead of me, it looked more like a lumpy ass. "How many do you want?"

"I think the real question here is... how many does the baby want?" Tom giggled, hugging Beverly from behind.

"Leave something for me!" I pouted. "I want to take some on my plane ride to Montreal."

"Oh, before you eat, and before I forget... do you like eggshell, or oatmeal, or dove for the baby's room?" Mom asked.

"Not more paint," I growled. "It's all white, Mom, just pick one."

"You're fighting a losing battle. Have you seen the swatches she put up on my wall?" Tom pushed me playfully. "She says I can choose, but at least three of them are the color of vomit."

"Children, stop bullying me or you're both grounded," Mom grinned.

"If you ground one of us for anything," Tom said, "it should be Rhiannon, because of the number of times she says fuck."

"Fuck off." I tried to trip him.

We laughed. Beverly's laugh sounded like mine, and mine sounded like Mom's, fitting together like we belonged. I just wanted to be here for a while longer with my mom, Tom, Beverly, and the baby. I wanted to look at a thousand shades of white and pretend to see a difference, because it was not about the paint at all. It was about us. We were a family, learning all the ways in which we could find each other again, fitting back together, trying, until it was like Victor never happened to us. It was like no time had been taken from us at all.

In time, we would tell Mom and Tom. We would tell Eli. We would get there. We were already well on our way.

Checkmate, Victor Carmichael. Beverly and I walked off from your chessboard. Coming back to Gaffney was as much her return as it was mine. We returned to our authentic selves. We returned to each other. I rewrote the family fairy tale; but this time, the ending was mine, and mine only. And it was happy.

Now, it was time to leave the past behind. The future—for once—seemed extraordinarily bright. It looked like glowing, brilliant glass.

                                                                 THE END