No.

Lyric stumbled back. She felt her parents catch her, and they held her tight. She welcomed their support. Her head was spinning.

Melody, the girl in the photo, the girl whose life she had lived, the girl who had lived her life… She had killed herself.

“We’re so sorry.” Allen told Lyric’s parents.

“Why?” Lyric’s dad breathed. For a moment, Lyric thought he was asking why they were sorry.

But Allen understood. He shook his head. “I wish I could tell you. Believe me, we’ve asked ourselves the same question every night. But her note… It didn’t have specifics.”

“What did it say?” Lyric’s mom asked. It sounded like she was fighting a lump in her throat. When Allen started to shake his head again, she pushed. “Please.”

Allen and Marina shared a look. Then Marina disappeared down a hallway. She returned moments later with a neatly folded piece of paper. She held the paper out gingerly to Lyric’s parents.

They read it together, and Lyric was left waiting for them to finish. A part of her wondered if she would get a chance to read it, but another hoped they wouldn’t let her. A suicide note would be morbid, and she didn’t think she would be able to handle it.

As she waited, Lyric noticed spots on the back of the note. They looked like water had landed on the paper and caused the ink to run through. The idea of the paper getting wet didn’t match the care Marina had treated it with when she brought it out.

Lyric was about to ask about the spots when her mom gasped, dropping the paper. Marina lurched forward to catch it, and Lyric’s mom tugged Lyric back, stepping in front of her.

“What did you do?” Lyric’s mom was demanding, her sadness clearly having turned to anger.

Marina flinched back. Her eyes darted between Lyric’s mom and the note still lying on the floor. “We… we didn’t do anything but love her.”

“How can you say that?” Lyric’s dad was also angry, but his anger was cold where her mom’s was hot.

Allen stepped forward, putting an arm around his wife. “We did our best.” He stated firmly. “That’s all any parent can do.”

“You killed our baby!”

Lyric didn’t know what was going on, but the hurt that her mom’s words made her feel gave her a push. She stooped to the ground and picked up the note. She didn’t have time to read it completely, but she skimmed it, looking for what had set her parents off.

There, at the end, was a line that made Lyric’s blood run cold. ‘You couldn’t love the real me, only the version I put out to make you happy.’ She assumed that the ‘you’ were Marina and Allen. Was Melody blaming them for driving her to kill herself?

Lyric’s mom and dad sure seemed to think so. In the next moment, her dad was ushering her out of the house. Lyric barely had time to place the note on a table by the door before they were outside.

“Why are we leaving?” Lyric looked back at the door. She could see Allen and Marina inside. They were watching her with longing.

Neither one of her parents said anything until they were on the highway.

“I don’t want you going anywhere near those people.” Her mom said.

“Why?”

“They’re toxic. They already drove one daughter to death,” Her mom turned around to look at her, and Lyric saw the fear on her face. “I won’t let them get you too.”

Lyric nodded. Her head was still trying to process everything, but she didn’t think it would be too difficult to follow her mom’s wishes. She hadn’t even known the Wolfes existed until recently.

Surely, they could all just go back to how things had been before they knew.