“I’m your real father, Viola.”

I stood there in his doorway, frozen, my whole body trembling.

For twenty-five years, my parents warned me about this man. They called him dangerous, unstable, a monster. But standing in that quiet living room with its neat bookshelves and the smell of fresh coffee, I realized something that made my blood run cold.

The monsters were never across the street. They were sitting at my dinner table every single night.

But let me back up, because you need to understand how a thirty-two-year-old woman ends up standing in a stranger’s house, discovering her entire life was built on lies.

My name is Viola Brennan. Or at least, that’s what I thought my name was. I’m thirty-two years old, and I work as an accountant at a mid-size firm in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. You know the type of job—decent salary, fluorescent lights, and a coffee machine that sounds like it’s dying a slow, painful death every time someone uses it.

I’ve been there for eight years, which in accountant years is basically a life sentence with good behavior.

I grew up in a nice house on Maple Ridge Drive—white fence, green lawn, the whole American-dream package. My parents, Jose and Constantia Brennan, were respected in our community. My father worked in insurance for thirty years, and my mother was a homemaker who volunteered at church functions and always brought the best casserole to neighborhood potlucks.

From the outside, we looked like the perfect family. From the inside, it was a different story entirely.

I have two siblings. My older brother, Wesley, is thirty-five and has somehow managed to fail upward his entire life. The man has had six different business ventures, all funded by our parents, and all spectacular failures.

But does anyone call him irresponsible? Of course not. Wesley is the golden child. Wesley can do no wrong.

Wesley once crashed my father’s car into a mailbox while texting, and my mother blamed the mailbox for being in the wrong place. That mailbox had been standing there for fifteen years. But apparently it chose that exact moment to jump in front of Wesley’s car.

Then there’s my younger sister, Nadia, twenty-eight, who decided that “finding herself” required visiting every country in Europe on our parents’ dime. She sends postcards from Barcelona and Florence, while I’m the one driving our mother to her doctor’s appointments and picking up our father’s prescriptions.

And then there’s me—the middle child, the invisible one, the one who does everything and gets nothing.

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