“Your mom?” Marcos’s grin collapses into pure dread, but my positivity can’t be snuffed out. I believe. I BELIEVE. After twenty agonizing seconds of typing, the call comes. Every drop of blood in my body hardens into ice—she’s calling me. “Connor, wait, don’t—!” Marcos blurts, but I’ve already accepted the call.

I had to.

“Momma?” I ask. Silence on the other end. “Mom? Are you trying to talk? I can’t hear you.”

She doesn’t speak, but her silence deepens into labored, staccato breathing, interrupted by occasional steady breaths. She’s smoking again. After twenty seconds of nothing but Marcos staring back, horrified, Mom’s voice comes, raspy and soft: “What are you doing texting me?”

My heart bangs against my chest. “Why? It’s…Christmas, Mom.”

“You trying to embarrass me? You haven’t done enough of that already?”

“Embarrass…? No, I—”

“Call to tell me I’m scum? On the Lord’s birthday? Not enough for you to tell the fake news I’m scum, you gotta do it to my face? On the LORD’S DAY? A day I might finally be able to get some peace? You don’t got ANY sense at all, Connor! You’re CRUEL!”

“Momma, but—”

“How could I have raised…how…? Such a cruel…don’t you know I can’t ever, EVER forgive what you did? Don’t you? Doesn’t anybody understand that?!”

I grip my phone until my hand becomes a claw, and all I can hear is my thudding heart. “You have to believe me.” Silence again. A puff of smoke hits her receiver. “Mom. You have to believe me. Me. Not someone else. ME.” Another puff. “I could’ve died, Mom. People died.”

“Connor…” she says. “I know…because you killed them.”

My belief in my mother finally meets a brick wall.

Marcos calls out to me, but the only sound in the room is my dull, slowing heartbeat. Agent Elms was right. The last time we saw each other, she warned me never to reach out to my mom again, but I had to. It’s Christmas.

In the initial days following our escape, the people who cried to me in public were crying about Ricky. Or Drew. As time went on, the crying became about me. About how my mother cut me off. The world watched as I was chucked out like a diseased animal.

Whatever our problems used to be—me being gay, whatever—it’s about her guilt now. She’s too stubborn, too ingrained in her own righteousness, to ever believe me about anything that happened on the island. She’ll believe any conspiracy theory if it protects her from the truth. She believed I was Avery’s dad against all evidence. And now she’s graduated to a worse theory.