A Pocket Full of Posies (Book 2)

Chapter Thirteen (Part 2)

Ha. Okay. Nah, she's having me on. I hear Carmen gasp, literally audibly gasp beside me, and I swear this whole thing is a joke. My instinct is to shoot my gaze towards Annabel, who's sitting cross-legged on the rug below us, and her instinct must be to do the same because her eyes are already locked on me when I turn to her. She shakes her head. She's just as clueless as I am. No memories triggered, then.

Before I can formulate any of my thoughts into words, not that I probably could anyway, Maeve stands up and begins shuffling through a cupboard in the small oak table in the corner of the room. She returns with a pile of photos, and hands them to me.

"You don't recognise him? No one ever mentioned him to you? At the hospital?"

I've never seen the photos in my hands before, but they're all images of my family, and he's there. The stranger who's been in my head. He looks younger though, much younger. He looks about my age now from what I can tell in the later photos. He looks like my dad. No, he looks like me, to an almost eerie extent.

All this time of having a single photo of my family, just one snapshot of eight years--one snapshot of nearly forty years if we're going by my parents' ages when they died--seeing all this now feels alien. It's like for the first time ever, I'm fully realising they were people. Real, actual people. The visions haven't even been able to do that, but these normal, boring family photos have finally made it click in my head. I feel sick.

"Do you have a bathroom?" I suddenly blurt out.

"What? Can you hold--"

Ava is silenced by Carmen, who gives her a nudge, and a look I can't quite see because of the angle I'm sitting.

"Oh, sorry," Ava says with complete sincerity in her voice.

"First door on your right when you leave the room," John offers.

It's not until I'm in the bathroom that I realise how bizarre my behaviour was just then. I just needed a moment. I need a moment. I'm not in the room two seconds when Annabel manifests herself with me. She's lucky I don't actually need to go. I can hear Ava, Carmen, John and Maeve speaking in the room next door, but I can't make out anything that's being said.

"Felix, are you okay?" Annabel questions.

None of this makes sense. Why does Connor look so much older in my visions? He looks about my dad's age. Older, even. How could none of the adults in my life after the crash have known about my brother? How is that even possible? I try to take my mind back to conversations with my grandmother before she died, but she never mentioned him. Her alzheimers meant she barely mentioned any of the family though.

"Felix? Felix, hey, look at me."

Why does he look the same age as my dad in my visions? That doesn't make--Wait, of course it makes sense. I'm seeing through the eyes of an eight-year-old in those visions. Every small kid thinks all adults look the same age. The only reason I see the rest of my family accurately is because I knew what they looked like beforehand, from the family photo. My present day self had no clue what Connor looked like, or who he was until now. That must be it. Okay. Okay, that makes sense. Something makes sense.

A pair of cold hands clasp my face, and I'm suddenly brought to the present.

"Felix, you're panicking. It's okay, just look at me for a minute. It's okay."

Annabel stares at me. Her eyes are big and hypnotising, and her presence is warm. How could she turn dark? Why would she do that to me?

"It was you. You turned dark, I saw it."

"What?" Annabel lets go of my face. "No, I wouldn't do that."

"I know you wouldn't now, but you would then. You did then. I saw it."