JANELLE CROSS

I can't piece it together!

I never really questioned my past…

Not the way people do in movies, anyway… where they wake up one morning and suddenly go hunting for their biological parents with nothing but a birthmark and a photograph. That wasn’t me.

I didn’t have a birthmark.

Or a photograph.

Or much of a childhood to begin with.

I only started asking questions when the rest of the world began looking at me like I was a puzzle piece they had seen before... when strangers stared just a little too long. When I was tagged in some ridiculous conspiracy thread about a dead woman I supposedly looked like. When a billionaire sat me down and asked me to be his girlfriend in public… for money.

I don’t know what broke first—my pride or my certainty.

But something did.

And suddenly, I was ten years old again, standing in a foster home in Dayton, Ohio, watching other kids be chosen while I stood off to the side, hands folded, trying not to make a sound.

I was always quiet back then. Not because I was shy, but because people stared when I spoke. I had this way of speaking that was… off. Like I had come from somewhere else. I couldn’t explain it. No one could. I’d say things like “flat” instead of “apartment” or “mum” instead of “mom.” I didn’t know why. It just slipped out.

My caseworker at the time used to say, “She’s a little unusual, but she’s sweet.”

Unusual.

That word followed me for years.

The Bakers were the ones who eventually took me in. Nice enough couple. I was six when they adopted me. They said my records had been lost in a fire at St. Augustine’s Hospital, the place where I was supposedly born. And for the longest time, I believed them. Why wouldn’t I?

I believed them until I tried to get my passport renewed at twenty-four.

That’s when the red flags started.

No original birth certificate. No traceable social security before age six. My adoption paperwork was spotty at best… half of it smudged, the other half “reconstructed” from witness affidavits.

And when I brought it up to Lisa, back when we were still partners and still talking, she just shrugged. “You think you were adopted from, like, a royal family or something?”

I laughed it off. But the itch never went away.

So last year… long before Grayson Vale ever entered my world… I took a weekend trip to Ohio. Alone.

I visited St. Augustine’s, or what was left of it. The building was a shell… burnt brick and overgrown weeds. An older man who worked at a nearby auto shop told me the fire happened nearly two decades ago, right around the time my records vanished.

I remember asking him if anyone survived.

He said, “Barely. One nurse. Left town not long after. Some say she knew things she wasn’t supposed to.”

That sat with me.

The name I had on my documents was Nurse Imani Fletcher. I found an address tied to her in an old state registry. It took me three buses and a rented bike to get there.

The house was empty when I got there.

“She passed away two years ago,” a neighbor had told me.

“No children? No family?,” I had asked, desperate for whatever looked like good news.

“None,” she said and walked away.

I didn’t cry. I just stood there in front of the nurse's porch like a fool, wondering if she ever remembered me… if I was even real to her. If she looked at a six-year-old version of me and thought, ‘You don’t belong here.’

That night, I sat in a cheap motel with flickering lights and googled my own name for the hundredth time. Nothing new. No relatives. No connections. Just old Yelp reviews and a blog post I wrote in culinary school about burning risotto.

It was like my life had started at six and everything before that had been vacuumed out of existence.

I went back to Dayton two more times after that. I tried looking into the orphanage I stayed at. It had been shut down due to “neglect and mishandling of children.”

Hardly surprising.

The man who ran it… Father Daniels… had been dead since 2012. Heart attack.

Everywhere I turned was a locked door.

I once found an old photograph tucked into the back of a library book I borrowed from the Dayton public library. It was grainy and damaged, but I thought I recognized the building in the background. It was a place I used to dream about… a seaside home with stone steps leading to a garden. I couldn’t place it. I still can’t. But it felt familiar in a way that made my stomach knot.

I kept the photo.

It’s in my wallet now. Folded, worn, and full of questions.

The weirdest part is, the more I searched, the more things around me began to fall apart.

One woman even told me to my face, “It’s not hard to tell why you wear misfortune as a cloth. You are bad luck.”

I stared at her like she’d slapped me. But she wasn’t even being cruel. Just… scared.

All of this started happening around the time I started asking questions.

About Eden…

About myself.

And maybe that’s what scared me the most… not that I looked like someone else, but that there were pieces of me missing I hadn’t even noticed were gone.

What do you do when you’re not sure your memories belong to you?

What do you do when your identity starts to feel borrowed?

I’d tried therapy once. Sat down with a woman named Dr. Hendricks. Explained to her how I sometimes remembered smells that didn’t belong to any place I’d lived. Or how certain accents triggered déjà vu. She told me it could be trauma; that early childhood suppression was common in adopted children.

“You need help, Janelle… and you need it quick,” she added.

But what if it wasn’t trauma?

What if it was a cover-up?

A rebranding of a life I was never supposed to remember?

Grayson’s questions stirred up everything I’d tried to silence. He thought I was Eden. And maybe he was wrong. Maybe I was just unlucky enough to look like a dead woman. But if he was right… if there was even a sliver of truth in his suspicion…

Then who the hell was I?

And why did my life feel like someone else’s dream?

I didn’t know who I was supposed to be.

But I was going to find out.

Even if it meant peeling back layers I wasn’t ready to see.

“I can help you,” Dr. Hendricks said.

“How?.”