I filled my lungs with a deep breath and dived in. There were a handful of CDs, mostly Korean pop that I didn’t recognize, but some American Top 40, too. A few items of clothing that told me my mother had been shorter than I was, a bracelet and a colorful blanket laid on top of two smaller boxes. I took out one of the boxes and removed the stuffing to reveal its ceramic treasure.

My throat closed, and my hands shook as I examined the small, smooth porcelain.

“It’s beautiful,” Landon said.

“It’s a teapot.” I laughed. It couldn’t have been more perfect in its simplicity, with its long, straight handle and light green shine.

“I guess you’re more alike than Mrs. Rhee realized.” He took it from me, and I reached for the last box.

It held only a small envelope with a handful of pictures. My birth mother stared back at me with a smile and my eyes, happiness emanating from her as she leaned against a bridge that overlooked what I assumed was Seoul. She couldn’t have been more than seventeen.

By my age, she’d already died.

There were a few more just like it in different places in the city, and she looked equally happy in all of them. “She was beautiful,” I whispered.

“Just like her daughter,” Landon answered, sitting closer to look at the pictures with me.

I flipped to the last one and my breath abandoned me.

She was held in the arms of a soldier—an American soldier. He wasn’t meant to stay. Mrs. Rhee’s words were on repeat in my head as I stared at her face—and his. They looked so happy, wrapped in each other—it was so right and so wrong all in the same picture.

“Rach…” Landon said, peering closer. “Oh my God. Isn’t that…?”

Eyes I knew as well as my own stared back at me, and I was immediately thankful we’d skipped dinner, because I knew it all would have come back up. My finger brushed across the Dawson name tag just above my birth mother’s hand on the army uniform.

“My dad.”

Chapter Thirty-Two

Landon

Los Angeles

I rubbed my scratchy eyes. Jet lag was fucking killing me. I glanced at my watch and then blinked. I’d forgotten to set it back to L.A. time, and it was still reading like we were in Japan. We’d only been gone three weeks—just long enough to finish out the term and all but one final a week early. Our Civ papers were turned in, but we had to do a Skype presentation for our final grade.

It was the only way the Study at Sea faculty would agree to the time off we needed for the X Games. We’d asked for ten days. They’d agreed to seven. Like I was in any shape for the Games. I’d counted on the Nepal trip to keep my physical edge, but I would never regret the trip I’d taken with Rachel in its place.

It had been the last time I’d seen her seminormal.

The moment she’d put the pieces together—that her dad was hers biologically—she’d withdrawn. She wasn’t sad, or angry, or sarcastic—she was simply gone. Even sitting in the car next to her now as we drove toward her parents’ house, she was lost in her own thoughts.

I couldn’t blame or push her. It wasn’t like I knew the appropriate time to let her process a bombshell that big, but two weeks seemed about right. And since I knew she’d asked for both of her parents to meet her at their house, I figured the shit was about to hit the fan.

So I did what had become my usual these last two weeks—picked up her hand and kissed the inside of her wrist. “Want to talk about anything before we get there?”

She shook her head.

“I wish you would. It’s killing me to watch you go through this and not lean on anyone. Leah says you haven’t talked to her, and Penna says the same. I feel like you’re this bottled-up stick of dynamite that’s going to blow at any minute, and I wish you would talk to me.”

Even if she blew up on me, it was better than the silence, than being locked out of her head. I had zero clue of what she was thinking. Was she still pissed at me? Still doubting me? Was she just biding her time so she could walk away from me for good? Was all the progress we’d made just in my own head?

She looked over and forced a flat smile, but her eyes softened. How was it possible to miss someone so much when they sat right next to you? Fear ran down my spine, cold and unwelcome. What if this was her way of walking away?

“I don’t know what to say to them,” she said with a shrug. “I’ve gone over so many options, and none of them seem to fit. I’m not mad. Okay, maybe a little mad about the lie, but I’m mostly sad that there’s this whole history that I didn’t know, that they didn’t think I was capable of hearing.”

“Have you ever kept a secret?” I asked as we turned into her neighborhood.

“Sure,” she answered. “More than my fair share of secrets involved you,” she added with an arched eyebrow.

My heart leaped at the show of spirit—of my Rachel shining through. “Okay, we’re a great example. At first, we kept us a secret because it would hurt Pax, right?”

“Right.”

My gaze dropped to her lips as I remembered those days, the stolen moments, the times I kissed her while my best friend was waiting for her in the next room. Now I had her, but it felt like she had one foot out the door…as usual, and that fucking terrified me. Add that to the fact that I was delivering her to the lion’s den, where her father had successfully ripped us apart not just once, but twice, and I was ready to vomit.