A/N: The new chapter of "We Three Hearts" is now available!

April 29th 2021

Chapter 119
Our Spooks For Truth

As distant in her own thoughts as she had appeared to be, Phoebe had likely heard her approaching. She didn't jump when Maya stepped into view, though she did have a moment of realization about just who it was who'd come to find her here. She would have expected it to be one of the Sandersons, but with it being her teacher, with the flood of relief not obscuring all of the worry underneath… Phoebe had been so caught up in her own thing, and now she was remembering the time before. The house, the candy, Halloween… and also…

"Don't know how I ended up here…" she spoke quietly. It was so unlike her.

"Back road?" Maya suggested, pointing over her shoulder.

"Yeah, I guess." Phoebe kept looking at the horse, kept brushing at her.

"Phoebe…" Maya stepped forward and the girl looked back at her.

"You… you and… Mr. Orlando, you… You've been friends for a long time, right?" she asked. The search was in her eyes; she needed to understand, but there was so much in her head and she didn't know what she was supposed to do to make sense of it. She didn't know what she was supposed to ask.

"Fifteen years," Maya nodded. Phoebe nodded to herself, mumbled 'fifteen' under her breath. Her questions were like a mess of bees in her head, and any new disruption would send them flying and buzzing around, until she couldn't find the right one anymore.

"His family, are they… are they happy, are they…" she blinked, reached to brush tears from her eyes.

"Yes, they are," Maya started, thinking of Dylan, his father, his stepmother, Kyle and his family… They were happy. They're happy now, but before…

"I'm not blind, you know? My parents have been acting weird since the school year started, and I've been trying to figure out why… to keep whatever it is away from Tay, but now… I think I know. I think my father must have… must have figured out, that I… I'm not…"

"Phoebe…" Maya stepped forward again. It would have been one thing if she'd figured out the actual truth all on her own, but it didn't feel likely to happen. Still, now Maya realized that her student had been out here for over an hour, crying over the wrong story. And she was going to have to set the record straight and make it even worse.

"But then Taylor, too… Are they still seeing each other, are they…"

"Phoebe, your father is your father, okay," Maya caught hold of her hand and gave it a light squeeze so that she'd look at her. "I don't mean in a 'he raised you' way, I mean in a biological way. Your father is your father, and your mother is your mother." She looked reassured, for a second, but then her face dipped into a frown of confusion.

"No, I saw the picture, in your house, I know that's Mr. Orlando. He doesn't have the hair anymore, but I know it's him, and he looks… he looks…"

"He's your brother," Maya came right out with it, no point in taking the long way around. We already did that, for over a year.

Phoebe received the confirmation, and the next wave of confusion washed in. Maya sighed. She brought her to where they could sit together.

"Do you remember, spring before last, when your mother did parent night instead of your dad?" She did. "The moment I saw her, there was something familiar about her, and I couldn't explain it. She looked like you, yeah, but that wasn't it. Then I saw her phone, I saw the picture she had there, of Taylor. And he looked just like my friend, like Dylan, when I first met him. I went home that night, and I found a picture of his mother, and it was her."

Phoebe was listening, looking at her and doing her best to just follow, but her questions kept buzzing up and multiplying.

"But he's not… We've never… I don't know…" she shook her head.

"Maybe I should let him explain…"

"No. No, I want you to," Phoebe pleaded. "I barely know him." But I know you. That was the sentiment, and Maya couldn't ignore it. "Please, I need to… I need to understand." There was nothing coming off of her that felt like resentment over the fact that she had this knowledge or that she hadn't shared it. Maybe it would come later, but now Maya suspected it wouldn't, and maybe she should have known it all along. She was so like her brother…

"Your family, are you happy?" Maya asked, flipping Phoebe's previous question. "Your parents together, are they good? You and them? Them and Taylor?" She nodded with an energy that said that yes, they were, very much so, which explained why her original presumption had been so terrible for her to behold. "Good, okay," Maya nodded back. "That's not going to change," she vowed. "That is not a lie, that is as true as you've known it to be, alright?"

"Yes," Phoebe sniffled. Maya could feel how she held on to her hand. Her trust was absolute. Her trust was unbroken. It made her next breath come with a shudder, with another wave of relief. She would need that strength.

"Your mother was married before. She was married to Dylan's father. They had two sons, Kyle and Dylan. Their father and yours, they knew each other, they were teammates in college. They stayed friends through the years. I… I don't know when it started exactly, but then your father and your mother started seeing each other in secret."

Maybe because she'd allowed this idea of an affair surrounding her mother inside her head already, Phoebe received this with less shock than might have been expected. Still, she was being presented this whole other narrative to her parents' pasts, the people they'd been before she was born, the way they had met and gotten together, and the context now… It was so much to take in.

"I can't speak for either of them, and if you want me to be there with you if or when you talk to them about it, I will be with you, I promise. You know them much better than I do, and if you use that knowledge, you might be able to fill in some of the blanks that neither I nor Dylan can fill."

"Why don't I know him?" Phoebe slowly asked. Even without knowing the answer yet, she looked like she could feel the precipice, just under her feet, and she was scared of what would happen when she fell in.

"Your mother was still Jocelyn Orlando when she got pregnant with you. She hid it, from her husband, from Dylan and his brother. I… don't actually know whether Mr. Orlando ever found out," she stated even as the notion came to her. "The boys didn't know. All they know is that their mother left one day, and she never came back. They had no idea she was even still in Austin all this time."

The stable was quiet for a minute or so after this. All they could hear were the horses, and the very low ambient noises of night around them. When Phoebe started to cry again, not just shed tears but actual crying, Maya put her arm around her shoulders, turned and put her other arm around her, too. Phoebe sank into the hold. For whatever Maya might have been left to think about Jo Munroe, about Peter Munroe, too, there'd been no way for her not to look at them from the perspective of 'Dylan Orlando is one of my dearest friends and one of the best people I know.' Now, holding this sweet girl, who could so easily fit in that category, too, as she was left to cope with this new reality, she had to wonder. Those two had raised her, and to hear her speak of them, to hear them speak of her, Maya knew that Phoebe had not grown to be this good in spite of them but largely because of them. They were a loving and tightly knit family, enough for this new truth to feel the way it did.

She'd stopped crying by the time Dylan appeared just outside the stable. Maya saw him and turned to look at Phoebe as she lightly tapped her shoulder. Phoebe turned her eyes up to her and Maya nodded for her to look. Dylan looked the way she'd felt when she'd first found Phoebe. Relief and worry cascading over one another. In Dylan's case, it came from his own place, from his own circumstances, and if Phoebe was the person Maya had known her to be, she would see what she saw. She would see a brother worried sick for his kid sister.

"Why'd you cut your hair? It looked better before," Phoebe declared in a tear-worn voice. It yanked a laugh out of Dylan that lit his face in all those ways in which he was so like her. Maya smirked, seeing how Phoebe was now getting to look at him and really see him. They were related alright. "You guys were looking for me, weren't you?" she asked now, like she was finally realizing it. She sat up, looking to both her teachers. "Did you tell my parents?" she asked. Even as she brought them up, she was left to remember what she'd just learned. She looked to Dylan, apologies lodged in her eyes when they were never hers to give, and he wouldn't ever ask them of her.

"No, it's alright," Maya shook her head. "If you're not ready to go home tonight, you've got a very devoted and very worried best friend waiting for you up the road. She'll definitely let you sleep at her house." Without a word, Phoebe pulled her phone from the pocket of her blue and white dress and let her thumbs fly across the keys, sending a message to Stella. Just seconds later, she got a reply, and it made her smile.

It wasn't all going to be fixed, like nothing had happened all of a sudden, but for this moment in time she was feeling more herself again, they could see it. A weight had been lifted, from many shoulders. When Phoebe stood and came to stand in front of him, Dylan looked at once nervous and hopeful.

"This is weird, isn't it?" she asked him.

"It is," he slowly nodded. "But good, too. This part right here. I hated lying to you."

"No, no, I get it," Phoebe promised at once.

"Yeah?" he smiled.

"Well, right now I'm thinking about what it's going to be like to have to tell Taylor, and… Yeah, kind of scared about how he'll take it."

"Right," Dylan sighed, thinking about the freshman boy.

"I think he'll get over it though. He always wanted a brother, used to say, 'how come I only got a sister?'" she imitated what had to be a much younger Taylor at the time, which made them laugh.

"Well, imagine that, I always wished I had a sister," Dylan confessed. He'd already taken her in as his own, Maya had seen it. And now, she knew she was witnessing the moment when he became filed under the heading of brother in Phoebe's heart and mind. There was that smile…

"Got one now."

As they hugged, Maya felt something so much bigger than relief wash over her, just as she could hear running steps from outside. A moment later, Stella Buckley came skidding into the stable, out of breath from running. Forever courteous, Dylan saw her as well and he allowed Phoebe to notice her and move from one hold into another. The best friends held firmly, as Phoebe apologized for the trouble that she'd caused her and Stella repeated that she was only glad that she was okay.

They walked back up the road, the girls' arms locked together and their teachers following right behind. The reunited group back at the house had apparently done their best to put the party back in search party, salvaging what they could of the evening while they waited. When the quartet arrived, they welcomed Phoebe like… well, like family. That was what she was now, wasn't she? Dylan was like their brother, and he was her actual brother, so that was all they needed to know to proceed in filling her head with as many stories as they could, the better to permanently break the vision that he was just any old teacher. She looked so happy to hear every single story, and he was as unreserved about his many clumsy adventures as he'd ever been, so on the whole, they could not have ended the night any better than this. Phoebe was soon ecstatic to learn that she was an aunt, twice over, between Kyle's daughter and Dylan's son. She couldn't wait to meet them.

In time, the party had no choice but to break. Everyone needed to head home, most of them to their children. Maya dropped off the girls at the Buckley house, making it back home in the waning minutes of October, so much so that she hurried up to find Lucas and be with him for a kiss at the stroke of midnight.

"And… November. Happy anniversary," she smiled up at him. He smiled back, holding her in his arms as though he'd waited to do it all night. "This was really not what tonight was going to be, huh?" Maya asked him, looking over to the crib, where Marianne slept.

"No, but we saved it in the end, didn't we?" Lucas pointed out.

"Yeah, we really did," Maya breathed, resting her ear nearly over his heart. It wasn't over, no, but what remained didn't feel nearly so scary anymore, did it?

"Good, then that's all you need to remember," he kissed the top of her head.

"I am officially putting the whole subject out of my head right now… until tomorrow, when I will be back at school, but right now, tonight and tomorrow morning, it is all about you, mister," she vowed. "You remember, this right here?" she took hold of him by the front of his shirt.

"Like I could forget," he grinned, leaning to meet her in a kiss. They'd been a couple for thirteen years now, and if she ever needed proof that it didn't have to be considered in any way unlucky, then all she had to do was think back and recall their first Hallowannie, the way it started, and the way it ended.

TO BE CONTINUED

See you tomorrow! - mooners