“Nathan?” I reached out to touch his arm.

He stepped back, staring at the document as if it were a weapon.

I looked down at the paper in his hands.

It was a certified copy of a birth certificate.

My name, Emily Carter, was printed at the top.

My eyes scanned down to the section for parents.

Under ‘Mother,’ it listed my mother’s name.

But under ‘Father,’ it did not say the name of the man who died in the West Virginia fire.

It read: *Arthur Sterling*.

The name stared back at me from the official paper.

Arthur Sterling.

My breath caught in my throat, hot and dry.

Arthur Sterling was Nathan’s father, the man whose portrait hung in the grand foyer downstairs.

If this document was real, Nathan and I shared the same father.

I looked up at Nathan.

His skin was the color of ashes, his eyes wide and vacant.

The paper trembled violently in his hand, the edges crinkling under the pressure of his grip.

“This is a mistake,” he whispered.

His voice sounded like dry autumn leaves scraping across concrete.