A Storm of Paper Starlings

Prologue

Her name is Violet. It's all I can give her.

That's what it said in the note that severed me from my roots—the note tucked carefully beside me in the equally abandoned car seat when I was freshly born.

My life was paper-thin, born on a day heavy with grief. No parents, no heritage, no clue who the I in the note was. Knowing nothing weighed a lot.

The truth of my beginning was an unheard whisper along a wire. A presence here, an absence there. A Violet-shaped hole I'd never see because it was filled with other people's grief. That was the truth that would outplay every lie I ever told myself.

Because truth, as my great-grandfather would one day tell me, has feet. It doesn't care if we believe it or not. It can sing at the surface, begging to be heard. Or be patient as death. Sometimes, it's a language we don't speak. It can give us wings, or lock us tight as bones. Weave itself into layers of possibility, waiting to be unpicked. It can be written to life, scratched into being, or dreamed beneath the stars. Sometimes, the truth falls into the palm of our hand.

Only lies care whether we believe them or not.

When my family came for me, I learned all the ways I could know the truth. I could bury it. Dream or paint or fight it. Twist it. Carve it into my skin. Scream or subvert it. Deny it. Own it. Live it.

If nobody had believed a lie, they might've looked for the truth sooner. They might've found it when a woman killed two nurses and stood over my cot with a dripping knife in her hand.

But nobody looked.

It was sixteen years before I began to know the truth, and even that was before all the other things wanted me dead.

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