The One Who Left | In Progress

{ Ch. 2 }

I look around at my new home with a wary eye.
This was strange, no shouts or yells or accusations yet. "Welcome to Seaview, California Lilah!" My father says enthusiasm pouring from his every word (even though he's faking it so much the plants can taste his falsely honeyed words). I still don't feel welcome, despite the effort of his greeting - opting rather to look around instead of my father. Derek was good looking, light skinned with a heart stopping smile, grey eyes - lighter, blending in with blues and greens - with blond hair, like his new family.

It's our old house - coined Thistlewood by my mother; the letters engraved in the very house itself, that fact surprises me the most - and angers me the most. If he wanted to replace Mom and I - did he have to do it here? Of all places.
This was my home before mom won custody of me. Before we moved to New York. Before my father stopped being a father.

But that was before. The aftermath of that was gut churningly painful. The porch swing Derek built for me - no longer white but a sanded down rich oak. The beautiful statues mom swore was a gift from Grandma, missing, replace by a fountain which I found immeasurably gaudy. Why waste time on a tiny fountain when you had the sea to your back?...unlike in New York; where the best anyone could do was the dirty lake water in the Hudson.

Derek Sterling became more and more repulsive to me. He changed nothing, he never changed... all he did was replace. He replaced mom and I, he replaced the house but kept the foundation. Always kept the foundation. He couldn't replace that, as he couldn't replace the ocean. A steady thrum beneath my feet, the ocean smelt as it always had - it echoed the same sound it always made.

I wish I could've shown mom how beautiful it looked now. Apparently people still remembered me from back then.
They said I look just like my mother. Dad didn't even ask me about her. I think know he knows she's dead now, but he didn't ask. So I didn't say anything. He could rot in curiosity if his need to know arose.

We walk to the porch in the uneven silence. Me two steps behind. I hated this. This never knowing what to expect. This uncomfortable moment of unease. This horrible expectation. I didn't know what to expect, on a normal day in a normal world - they'd be scandalised by the arrival of Derek's legitimate daughter, but with the contract - who knew how they'd react.

Dad swings the door open suddenly, revealing pair of girls and a woman who look like they could all be sisters. "These are my daughters Morgan and Madison Sterling and my wife Jessica Sterling." Derek introduces. "Everyone, this is Delilah Kade." They blink at me and I blink at them. "Who's this?" A girl with sparkly glittered strawberry blond hair accuses and her sister pulls her back. That must be Morgan, the shyer one. "Your stepsister." The woman, Jessica, flowed beside her husband. His arm slung around her waist. I pull a face, she was younger than him by a good decade or so.
The twins look at me with open curiosity and I bare my teeth at them, scaring them for a moment. "She's feral." Madison sniffs daintily. "She's family." Her mother replies with steel in her voice. Morgan hides behind her mother and my blank mask returns, veiling my truest of emotions. My envy and jealously of the twins having a mother and a man who wanted to be their father. "Aren't you Lilah." Derek prompts me and I give him a rancorous grin. "Of course, Derek." I can't conceal all my emotions. Derek will soon learn that trapping me will be met with resistance and me toeing the line between what is accepted and what is not.

The family of four look at her with shock. I shrug, I've never been one to back down from a fight. Morgan tucks back her light blond hair behind her ear. Morgan was just as pretty as her twin but more subtly. Hers was a quiet beauty where Madison's effect was immediatly noticeable.
Not anymore, I smirked quietly. I was no Madison but I had a plan... setting the siblings up against each other. Cruel but necessary if I wanted to go back to NYC, where I truly belonged.