In life, I have found that there is always an alternative. There is always another way, another version, another reason. Always another piece to a puzzle we didn't know we were trying to solve. In life, there is always something else that can be found. Something that will fit where something must dwell, and fill the space that seems too large. There is always another option. Always another explanation. Even when it seems impossible.

For most of my life, I have strived to believe in the alternative. To search for and accept the best in the face of the worst. Often, it has been the only light in an otherwise dark tunnel of discouragement and disappointment. The other explanation. The other way. The other piece.

I tried to come up with an alternative. In the last 20 minutes that I'd spent sitting in the car, waiting for Logan or Tyler to finally explain what was going on, I'd desperately searched for another way to explain every piece of what I don't understand. 20 minutes of waiting. 20 minutes of thinking. 20 minutes of wondering what could have possibly made Logan react that way to see Marley's grave. It was supposed to be a therapeutic moment for me. A moment of solitude where I could attempt to find peace in the only person who ever cared about me. It was meant to ease the never-ending feeling of uncertainty that had overwhelmed me since she died almost a year ago.

But it hadn't done that. If anything, it had only made the feeling all the worse. A burning sensation in my chest had formed in the last 20 minutes. Searing and impossible to ignore, no matter how many times I tried to flush it out with another deep, unsatisfying breath.

I could see them through the car window. Logan and Tyler, standing at the front hood of the car with matching frowns on their faces as they spoke to one another in quiet voices. Neither one had said much to me when we'd gotten back to the car from the grave sight. Logan had just opened the door for me with that blank, haunted look on his face, gently ushered me inside, and tried not to meet my eyes as he kissed the top of my head and whispered a hardly reassuring 'we'll be right back. Then a moment later, I'd seen Tyler reappear from wherever he'd been to join Logan, the same ghostly expression melting his features within seconds of their conversation.

I was beginning to make myself sick as I worried about all the possibilities and all their alternatives. I had yet to come up with a viable theory for my brother's intense, and confusing reaction to seeing my friend's grave. As far as I could see, it didn't make any sense. Logan didn't know Marley. He'd never met her, and I had never even mentioned her to him or anyone else since I'd moved to Harlem. I watched as Logan tugged at his brown hair outside the front windshield. He rubbed his face with his hands and said something to Tyler who hung his head sadly.

Logan glanced up at the windshield. We locked eyes and a grimace passed over his face. Then he turned back to Tyler and said something, jerking his head in my direction. Tyler sighed visibly and nodded in response to whatever Logan had said, before the both of them trudged their way over to my side of the car. Logan was the one to open the door, a sad, thin smile on his pale face.

"Hey, baby, how are you feeling?" He asked, as if I had been the one acting strange and unruly. I frowned at him but didn't say anything back. He glanced over his shoulder at Tyler and sighed. "Izzy, honey, we need to talk to you, okay? And I need you to tell me the truth about a few things."

I stared at him blankly. I hadn't lied about anything. Not that I was aware of anyway. And I was wholly unsure of why my brother would tell me to be honest when I knew I had been nothing but honest since I'd known him. About most things anyway.

"Izzy? Can you do that for me?" Logan asked in a voice akin to one you might use with a scared toddler. I nodded slowly.

Logan's throat bobbed with a thick swallow as he turned around to give Tyler a pained look. Tyler nodded at him once more as a sort of silent motion of encouragement, and with a visibly shuttering sigh, Logan faced me once again with his face contorted into something startlingly foreign and hollow. A shiver of fear ran down my spine as my fingers dug into the leather of the car seat on either side of my body.

"Izzy, how do you know Marley Jacobs?" Logan asked softly, glancing over one shoulder towards the grave sight we'd left only a short time ago. I followed his gaze as I pondered how to answer the question. At a quick glance, the answer was simple;Marley Jacobs was my best friend. She was the center of my soul. She was a missing piece in a puzzle I never got to finish. She was the only person I'd ever really loved. But none of that felt right to tell my brother. The words felt too heavy and personal to share with anyone, even Logan. Marley was an omission I'd carried with me since the second I'd lost her, and I wasn't sure I was ready to lose that ounce of privacy I'd made for myself just yet. "Izzy?" Logan prompted when I took too long to respond.

"She was my friend," I signed slowly. "My neighbor, growing up." It was a simple oversight of the truth, but it would suffice for what was being asked of me for now. Or so I hoped. No one said anything for a moment. Both of my brothers stared at me with wide, unreadable eyes.

"You were close to her?" Tyler asked in almost a whisper. I swallowed hard once again.

I nodded carefully, feeling a cold sense of dread and discomfort solidify in the pit of my stomach. "Very."

Tyler's head dropped between his shoulders and I watched as his fingers clung to the car door so tight, the skin of his knuckles turned a painful shade of pale. Logan pinched his eyes shut tightly for a moment. And when he snapped them back open, I didn't miss his small glint of determination that told me he wasn't done yet.

"Izzy, when did Marley die?" His voice quivered almost unnoticeably.

I frowned even deeper, the cold feeling rising even higher inside my body. "Why?" I signed cautiously.

Logan shook his head. "Isabelle, I need to know the answer to my question. When did Marley die?" His voice was harder than it had been before, laced with displeasure and impatience.

"1 year ago." I signed quickly, not wanting to upset him anymore than I already had.

Logan's mouth parted slightly as he inhaled a small sharp breath of air, one of his hands coming up to cover his mouth. Tyler sighed heavily and turned around for a moment so I couldn't see the look on his face.

"Why? Please tell me what's going on." I practically begged as I looked at Logan. My brother bit his bottom lip and reached out to take my hand into his own, silently squeezing so tight it almost hurt. I didn't dare pull away. Tyler turned back around. He looked at Logan before he looked at me. "This is insane. I can't believe this is actually happening." Logan shook his head in response, but didn't say anything more.

"Logan," I tapped his hand to get his attention back on me. "Please tell me what's going on. Why do you want to know about Marley?" My brother sighed once more and dipped his head down to let the clammy skin of his forehead rest against my fingers still interlocked with his own. I waited patiently for a few seconds before he finally sat up and looked me dead in the eye with that same sense of resolution from before.

"Izzy...how much did Marley tell you about her family?" He asked quietly. I shrugged slowly, still beyond confused by where he was headed with his questions. "I knew her mom," I signed. "She never said much about her dad. I think he moved out when she was a kid." Logan frowned even deeper, his grip on my fingers tightening even more. "No siblings, or family members?" He asked with a tone I couldn't recognize. I shook my head and the grip got even tighter. Tyler stepped forward and leaned down slightly so he was closer to my sitting height.

"Izzy, what do you know about our dad?" My eyebrows furrowed at the question, the sense of confusion and discomfort swelling to epic proportions inside my stomach. I couldn't for the life of me understand what dots Tyler was trying to connect.

I'd never even met our father, and Marley certainly hadn't either. When I'd asked her, she'd sworn he'd never even visited when I was a baby, and she had never laid eyes on the man. For most of my life, my father had been a shadow in my life that I didn't feel much need to shed light on to understand. He'd left me. Abandoned me with my mother and left me to wither away while he was here taking care of my siblings. I had assumed him dead long before I knew it was true and hadn't given him much thought otherwise. I swallowed once more, a lump of frustration and displeasure filling every inch of my airway.

"Nothing," I signed. "Only what you've told me." Tyler nodded, an unreadable expression crossing his face as he took in my words. Logan tugged on my hand and I looked back at him.

"Izzy...Izzy, we have to tell you that I don't think you're going to like it." I had assumed as much by the odd way they were acting, but the confirmation still made fear seize every available part of my body as I readied myself for whatever was to come. Tyler put a hand back on Logan's shoulder, another silent squeeze of encouragement. Logan exhaled softly then met my eyes fully with so much emotion in them that I feared he might drown.

"Izzy, um, when I was...when I was a baby our mom and dad broke up for a while. I-I don't know why, exactly, but Dad had lived in Georgia when he was a kid and for a while, I-I guess he moved back here when things were rocky at home. I don't know the-the full story and all, but I do know that he got a woman pregnant while he was here and he and the woman had a baby." He paused and looked up at me like I was supposed to get it. I didn't say a word. He bit his bottom lip and shook his head, but didn't hesitate long before continuing. "Anyway, our dad moved back to Harlan sometime after the baby was born and he and mom went on to have Finn, then you and Emma later on. We didn't know about the baby until after...until after Mom took you away,"

He paused again, this time seeming to lose himself in a moment of painful thought. I didn't rush him or even make a move to remind him I was there. I decided he needed the moment. And I would be the one to give it to him. He sighed quietly. "Dad told us about her when she came to stay with us one summer. She was 13. I was 15. She-she was...good. She was good and we kept in touch for a few years but I never had any idea that she was...that she was living so close to you all this time."

I stared at him blankly. The words were not computing in my brain. A father. A woman. A baby. A town. A secret. It was all too much for my mind to handle at once, and for me to make any sense of. My father had an affair in Georgia while separated from my mother while Logan was a baby. My father got the woman pregnant then left and went back to Harlan to my mother and the rest of my siblings. No one knew about the baby. Then they did. I was gone, and she was there.

She.

I knew who she was. I couldn't know who she was and what this all meant, and yet, the conclusion, the words of confirmation refused to sink in and make any bit of sense. "Who?" I asked, hoping I was wrong. The boys shared a look. Tyler touched my leg. I jerked away and furrowed my eyebrows at him.

"Izzy, do you understand what we're saying?" He asked in a whisper. I shook my head.

"Izzy," Another look shared between the two. "Izzy, we're saying that Marley is our sister."

THE WORLD THAT WAS MINE

"Is she still in there?" I pinched my eyes shut tightly when I heard Tylers' soft outside the bathroom door, talking loudly to Logan in the hotel room. I hadn't heard a sound from either of them in almost an hour.

After we'd gotten back to the room from the cemetery, I'd immediately locked myself in the bathroom for a few moments of peace. The world was too loud. My brain was too loud. I felt like I couldn't breathe. Like I couldn't exist. I'd been sitting on the floor for an hour, the cold tile the only thing keeping me grounded. It had been a necessary move of self preservation and the only reason I hadn't lost any semblance of stability in the last 60 minutes. My sister. The word kept tumbling around my brain like a rock over and over and over again, each time the edges of it getting sharper and more defined.

Marley was my sister. I wasn't sure I even really believed it was true. I had asked Tyler to repeat himself no less than 10 times after he'd said it the first time at the cemetery. Each time he'd said it slower, and more carefully like he didn't understand why I was asking that of him. Sisters.

It was hard to swallow. Nearly impossible. Just like I had to find out about my other siblings three months ago. Yet somehow, worse. That was fathomable. That fit into the scope of my life and what it all meant. That was a foreign concept outside of my perception that could be anything it wanted to be. Marley was not. She had been in my perception for as long as I could remember. I knew her in every capacity, she was nothing even remotely foreign. She was a part of me and my existence from the start, and it was hard to mold her image into anything that resembled what I was being told. It felt like I'd been lied to.

And I wondered if I had. I didn't know anything about my father, and even less about Marleys, but I knew she had met him a few times in her life, as a teenager and as a child. I remembered when she went to stay with him when she was 13. I had been angry with her for leaving that summer, but when she'd gotten home, I'd quickly forgiven her, having only been seven at the time. She hadn't said much about her dad then, or anytime after that. I never asked either. I was never one to push for information. I was never one to push for anything to be fair.

"Yeah, I think I heard the water running." Logan answered quietly.

I hadn't bothered to take my hearing aids out. At first, because I forgot about them and the thought didn't occur to me in my state of duress, but after, it was because I wanted to be able to hear what my brothers were saying outside the door. I didn't want to miss any more information. I already felt like I was light years behind everyone else, left in the dark yet again while everyone else got to thrive in the light. It was morbid curiosity more than anything. A selfish need to see if they were struggling as much as I was with this winding road of unkempt truths. From what I could gather, they hadn't known that Marley had died. They apparently hadn't kept in touch in the years they'd spent apart from one another, despite evidently having a reason to do so. Their sister.

My sister. It felt weird, and uncomfortable to lump Marley in with the likes of my brothers and Emma, and even weirder to picture her actually in their vicinity. They were nothing alike. They had nothing in common. They were two sides of one spectrum, like puzzle pieces that didn't fit. I kept trying to make sense of it all. I kept trying, and until I was successful, I would keep trying again.

I heard Tyler sigh outside the door. "Shit, this is so hard." He said to Logan.

"Yeah, it's terrible. For all of us. I can't believe she's really gone." Logan's voice cracked a little, and a piece of my heart seized up painfully. I could hear the hurt in his voice. The sadness and the loss stitched into every word he'd spoken since he'd seen the grave. It was clear he felt a lot about her. That he'd cared for her at some point in time. I knew the feeling well. To lose someone you'd once held dear. I'd done it more than once. Far too many times if I was honest.

"I know," Tyler whispered. "Trust me I know."

"Should we go get her?"

They were talking about me now. I knew they were growing worried about me after so much time. I'd refused to talk to either of them about any of it since the start, and I knew it was making their concern grow. I could see it in the way Tyler looked at me. I could hear it in the way Logan talked to me. I could feel it in their cold attempts of comfort they'd tried to give to me. Their concern itself had been palpable for months, since the first time they'd seen me break, but now, it was everywhere. Filling every inch of my existence, both physical and emotional. It was suffocating. All of it was. But that was nothing new in my world.

Tyler didn't respond to Logan's question, but a moment later, I heard a soft rapping at the door. "Izzy, kiddo, you in there?" Tyler asked in a thin voice. I didn't respond. I wasn't sure why he expected me to.

"Does she even have her hearing aids in?" Logan grumbled somewhere in the room behind him.

Tyler sighed. "Iz, honey, if you can hear me, I would love to talk to you for a little while. I-I know this is all scary and confusing, and I'm sorry if we didn't tell you the right way, but I really think we should talk this through a little more. I think that it might help me and you." I heard his body lean against the door, another heavy sigh escaping his throat.

"Lo? A little help here or something?" The bed creaked in the room. I pulled my knees tighter to my chest and tucked my chin into my lap.

"Izzy, baby, can you hear me?" Logan's voice replaced Tylers'. I still didn't bother to react. "Iz, we need to talk. There are parts of this I don't think you understand yet, and parts we don't understand either. This is a story that requires all the pieces to the puzzle, and we need each other to get those." He sounded exasperated. Tired and drained, and nothing like my favorite brother that I had come to know so well. It reminded me of when I'd been in the hospital, how defeated and broken he'd been for those few days. I never wanted that for him. He didn't deserve that.

But then again, who ever deserved the bad things that came to them? I tried to picture him with Marley. I tried to imagine what they had thought of each other, and how they got along. They were similar in a lot of ways. And yet different in a lot more. They were opposite sides of a specific spectrum, and I couldn't form a mental image of them within 15 feet of each other, let alone living as brother and sister. But maybe that was just my perception. Maybe that was just me.

"She definitely can't hear us in there," Tyler grumbled.

A knock sounded firm against the wood. "Iz, baby, please, just come out and talk to us. Please, help me make this easier for all of us-"

"Logan, she can't hear you-"

"Izzy, please, this is so hard and I'm sorry you have to deal with this, you don't deserve another issue to deal with but please-"

"Logan, she doesn't have her hearing aids in, she isn't listening to what you're saying."

"We're here for you Iz. Every single step of the way, we're here for you, but please just come out and let us help and let us make it better-"

"Logan for god's sake, stop it, she clearly can't hear you." There was silence on the other side of the door after that. I heard shuffling against the wood and soft, raspy breathing so close, that I could feel every emotion inside of it.

"Izzy," Logan whispered brokenly. "Please don't shut me out. Please, not now. Please I need you Iz. You're my best friend, and I'll always be here to help you, but please, I need you to let me try." My heart clenched painfully in my chest. I swallowed thickly as I tried to decide what came next. If I could handle what came next. My back dug into the wall behind, an impossibly human reminder that I was still here, and still in fact, breathing, even if it didn't feel like it. My existence was debilitating. But it always was at times like this. I felt sick. Physically ill, with too many emotions and feelings crowding my airway and the pit of my stomach, forcing me to feel as human as I ever had before.

"Logan, I know- I know you want to talk to her, but she can't hear you. Let's just...just give her some space for right now." Tyler was talking to him like a child, but I could hear the tilt of defeat in his voice as he said it. It was my fault. I knew it was. Their brokenness was my fault. It always had been, but I felt the weight of it right then. Debilitating to its core.

"Izzy, please, help me. I need your help right now, baby. I need you to let me help you." Logans whispered again. "I love you so much, Izzy. So much. I need to help you. Please, just let me help you." His voice cracked. I inhaled sharply, feeling a painful stab of guilt and sadness and need for comfort in that moment, mixing and intertwining with my need for silence and space to think. "Just talk to me. That's all you have to do. Just let me in, just this once."

With a stroke of energy and determination, I rose to my feet and walked to the door, taking a ragged, painful breath in before I carefully pulled the door knob open. Logan stood up off the floor immediately and faced me with wide, shocked eyes, Tyler's almost a mirror image behind him. They both stared at me like I was an alien with three heads, but I stared back with a blank expression.

"Izzy-"

"Tell me what you know about her." I signed, stopping Logan in his sentence.

He nodded slowly and walked to the hotel room couch, sitting down and motioning in front of him for me to do the same. And with a deep breath, and a forceful metal reminder that I was doing this for him, I followed his instructions.

Because in this world, our feelings are not often about us. They are a reaction to others around us, and an accommodation to those we care about.

Our feelings are meant to fit into the lives of others and the expectations of others.

This world is made for those willing to bend their own emotions for the comfort and happiness of others.

It is made for those of us who push ourselves small for the benefit of everyone else.

And perhaps that is why I will someday find a place in this world.

A/N-A bit of a shorter chapter for now but I didn't want to over do it with information. I really hate this chapter but I had to get something out before I started school, and you guys deserved to have something while I had the time. Ok before we get into talking about the chapter, I do have to make a disclaimer; this summer, I dealt with some of the worst depression of my life. It was a constant battle from the end of June to the middle of August, and truthfully, I had no motivation or energy to do anything other than go to work and sometimes work out for field hockey season. I'm doing much better now but this summer has sucked, so I hope you all can forgive me for the lack of updates and understand that I tried many times to get something out but didn't have much luck. Also, thank you all for 700,000 views on this story, your support and kindness means the absolute world to me and I'm so proud of all that I've accomplished on this story. Please also note that I will always finish this story. No matter how long it takes me to update, I promise this story will without a doubt come to an end eventually.

Anyway, I hope this was all a shocker for you. Surprisingly no one guessed this in the last chapter, despite the hints I dropped in the interlude :)) So what do we think? Please I wanna hear what you all got to say about all of this. Inspire me, I beg you. I love Izzy. Every time I come back to this story, I'm reminded how much I love her and Logan. Thank you all for your continued love and support it means the world to me and it helped me get through this summer and much of the last few years. I hope I'll be able to update again soon, but I always say I will, and I never do, so I hope to see you all before Halloween lol

Please take care of yourselves today! Drink some water, go for a walk, and eat a good meal :))