My hands pushed open the door as I walked through, stepping into the lobby of the bus station. And there he was—standing at the ticket window with his back to me. "Jug," I spoke, as the door chimed shut behind me. He'd immediately turned around a bit at the sound of my voice.

His eyebrows knitted, disbelief etching his features. "Diana? What are you doing out of the hospital?"

"Everyone's looking for you, Jug," I answered, taking steps toward him. "They looked everywhere, but I figured the bus station would be the place to find a runaway."

"I'm not running away. I'm doing what I should've done a long time ago," he corrected, his features flattening out across his face.

There was a certain tiredness, a sadness, that colored him in. It was impossible not to notice. He was not alright. Not at all. I stood a foot from him, my shoulders slumped. "Jughead...FP didn't kill Jason. That's...that's not even a possibility," I shook my head, keeping my tone as positive as I could manage.

Jughead scoffed lightly. "They found the gun in his trailer, Diana. You know, all this just makes me realize I don't know him at all."

"Well, I do. And FP would never kill anyone—especially not a teenage boy," I said, adamantly. "We can figure this all out, okay? But not if you leave Riverdale. "

"There's nothing to figure out! I'm leaving on a bus to Florida at six am. That's it. These guys are closing so I'm going to Pop's. Do you wanna come with me or not?"

His question was lighter in tone than the rest of his sentence. But it was still harsh. Taking a deep breath, I nodded, and followed him outside. It was hard to hold it back—all the things I wanted to say. It was impossible to wrap my head around the idea of FP killing Jason Blossom. There was no way on this Earth that FP Jones was a murderer. I'd refused to believe it. We stat in a booth at Pop's in silence. He leaned into the wall, slid halfway down the seat, eyes aimed somewhere out the window.

I sat forward in the booth with my forearms on the table, one folded and the other straightened to stir the mug of coffee in front of me. I could feel it, the tension. It was a hard rock in the space between us. I'd felt like his offer to join him was a kind of way of saying 'want to say goodbye?'. But we weren't saying anything. And, maybe, that was the goodbye in and of itself? Regardless, I'd texted Archie and told him I'd found Jughead.

That Jughead was okay, and there was no reason to search anymore. Then he started pressing me for details. For locations. I knew that the last thing Jughead wanted was to see his friends. He wanted selective solitude. But it was the only choice I had to get Jughead to stay. So I told Archie we were at Pop's. It was a decision I might've ended up regretting, but all I could think about was losing Jughead again.

If Jughead left, he would never come back. Not even for me. And I couldn't really blame him. Riverdale had turned into a sideshow. Neighbor against neighbor, everyone always pointing fingers, putting the wrong people behind bars without dealing with the real problem. I sat back in my seat, dropping my left hand in my lap, while my right hand loosely fidgeted with my mug. "Are we gonna talk about this?"

"What is there to talk about?" he replied, almost—almost—stoic.

"Well, if you're leaving, you'll never know the truth—for one," I'd glanced at him briefly. His eyes remained gazing out the window with a downright depressed demeanor. Blowing air through my lips, I moved my eyes back to the table top. "I'm gonna miss you. A lot. Nothing's going to be the same around here."

Finally, he moved. He turned his head toward me, in an almost loll across his shoulders, and I tried to make my eyes stay on his. There were pink lines along the edges of his eyes. His orbs were glossed over, with a light glisten. "You said you knew my dad...what did you mean by that?"

"Exactly what I said. I've been around FP just as long as you have—actually, a week longer, if you want to get technical."

"Don't you think that's strange? How we were born almost exactly one week apart?" his eyes narrowed as he spoke, making a dark expression of questioning. "How our families have always been really close—almost too close? Yeah, our dads were friends. But our moms hated each other. Yet you and I? Sometimes I think we were supposed to be twins."

My eyebrows knitted softly in confusion. "Jughead...what's your point?"

He dug a hand into his pocket. When he pulled it out a second later, he held what looked to be a crumbled and folded letter. With a bit of a slam, he slapped the wadded paper on the table top, and then slumped back into the corner of the booth again. "Found that in dad's trailer. It's an interesting read. Fair warning—it's a tear-jerker."

The drastic change in conversation confused me deeply. But the letter, even more so. I was hesitant to take it. To open it. To unfold it. I didn't know if it was something I should've been reading. But I'd read it. And, to this day, I wished I hadn't. Inside the folded and crumbled envelope was a single sheet of paper. It looked to be some kind of blood work-up. There was even a header for the hospital here in town. That was about all I could make of it.

Then my eyes skimmed over the work-up. What caught the breath in my throat was not the blood type or levels. It was the name on the form. In big, bold letters—PATIENT NAME: DIANA CASSIDY. It was my blood. My eyes quickly flickered to the date at the top of the page. By the look of it, this was done when I was seven. My mom would've been pregnant with Cash at the time. I'd had no idea this even existed. Serpents don't typically use hospitals.

But this was too official. My eyes skimmed down further, back over the work-up. Nothing was out of the ordinary. Jughead's comments seemed even more off-the-wall. And then I saw it. It was a DNA match. Whatever sample they'd used was tested against my mother's, my father's, and FP's. My mother's was a match. My father's was not. Who else was a match? FP Jones. Shocking, isn't it? At the time, I thought it was. Not so much anymore.

See, when something difficult is happening to you, you do not see all the sides. You do not see everything. But when you've lived past it, you can see truly all the things you'd missed—or had chosen to ignore. And they all come back to haunt you. I'd had mixed emotions about the results of the test of the page. All I could do was drop my hands in my lap and stare at the steaming mug on the table. Surely, this couldn't be real.

It had to be fake. Something drawn up by someone looking to cause trouble. But, even still, I had to ask. "How long have you known about this?" My voice was quiet, full of shock, and barely audible. Jughead crossed his arms and slumped in his seat.

"Only for a few hours," he'd replied. "Stings—doesn't it?"

"So your dad and my mom got together a week before...?" I exhaled, shaking my head. "Mom hated FP. She said he was a bad personality influence."

"Obviously, she was just trying to further the act," Jughead said, still quite stoic.

I turned a little in the booth to better face him. "Jughead...we're siblings. Why would they keep this from us?"

"My guess? Someone on either side didn't know, and there was too much to lose if it got out. So they agreed to act like they hated each other and kept it locked away. I doubt your dad ever knew."

What he'd said made sense. And the bitterness in his voice when he said it was something I was familiar with. It was angering. Even after my parents died, FP still didn't come clean. It all had made sense then—the babysitting, rides to school, teaching me to fix a bike, helping me through initiation, the looks, the hugs. When I'd called him dad outside the Sheriff's station and he hugged me so tightly. It was because the title was more real than I'd thought.

His behavior in my hospital room came back to me. How he seemed off. Like he wasn't saying something he'd wanted to say. How final his exit felt. He wasn't just visiting to give me a birthday gift and check up on me. He was saying goodbye. FP had to have known Sheriff Keller was on to him. With this bombshell of a lie, it wasn't hard to see where Jughead got his certainty in FP's guiltiness. Because I was starting to think that way, too.

If FP lied about this, what else has he lied about? Killing Jason Blossom? It was a slippery slope. But it was a believable one. And it was starting to come full circle in my mind. I'd missed the bell above the door, but there was no missing the voice from behind—one distinctly belonging to Archie Andrews. "Diana, Jughead," he said, causing me to immediately twist in my seat to see behind. Betty and Veronica trailed just behind him. "You guys okay?"

I took a shaky breath and turned straight forward. Archie and Betty slid into the booth seat opposite me and Jughead, while Veronica remained standing, just behind me. I looked to Jughead. His eyes were out the window once again, a purely saddened echo to his flattened features, eyes still glossed. I shook my head a little, looking back to Archie. "Far from it," I admitted, averting my eyes, moving them to my coffee mug.

I hadn't taken a drink in half an hour. But I took a sip then—if anything, just to distract my emotions from the lump in my throat. I'd hoped that the heat would melt it. "I'm so sorry, you guys," Betty said, glancing between Jughead and I. Her gaze ended on Jughead, a certain shade of longing coloring her entire face.

"There's something you need to know," Archie said, quickly, as I put down my mug. "That gun? It wasn't in FP's trailer when Veronica and I searched it. Someone put it there—after."

Jughead perked up almost instantly, eyes narrowing slightly at Archie. "What?"

"It was planted—your dad is being framed," Veronica reiterated.

A certain relief flooded my body hearing those words. But my instincts took over, pulling me out of my seat to stand beside the booth. "We need to tell Sheriff Keller," I declared, glancing at all of them in turn, sporadically. "If FP is being framed, that means he is innocent. Jug, if you wanna sit around and mope—be my guest. But I'm going to get our dad out of jail."

There was a confused glance that swept across the booth, everyone looking to each other for confirmation of what I just said. But Jughead looked right at me. The sadness that once colored his face was now a hardened determination. "I'm with you," he nodded once, before sliding out of the booth.

"We're all with you," Archie stood in his declaration.

Betty slid out after he did, and I started for the door. There was no way I was letting this slide. If Jason's killer wanted a fall guy, then he messed with the wrong family. And they were about to find out.

We pushed through the doors of the Sheriff's station, the group pouring in, just a stride behind me. I marched straight to the front desk, staring down the woman behind it through the bullet proof glass. "We need to talk to the Sheriff," I said. "There's been a huge mistake." The group was crowded behind me.

Not a second after I spoke, Veronica—somewhere behind me—said, "Sheriff Keller. We need to talk to you about FP Jones."

I turned around as the Sheriff replied. "What about him?" he asked, eyes narrowed. He looked slightly exhausted, and incredibly done with this day. He was looking exactly how I felt, in other words. Archie stepped up. "He's innocent," he explained—sort of. "He's being framed."

"Then why'd he just confess?" Sheriff Keller asked, raising a brow.

That's when my heart dropped. Just then, two deputy's were escorting FP to the jail cells. Walking right past us. My heart was racing, yet in my throat at the same time, and I couldn't stop. My feet moved me forward before anyone noticed. I reached out. "Dad- Dad, what are you doing?" I questioned, my voice drenched in an anxious panic, as my fingers gripped FP's sleeve.

The deputy's looked confused, moving him away from me, as they told me to back away. I didn't have a chance to comply. Sheriff Keller's arms were around me a second after I hadn't moved, gently tugging me backward. And the deputy's pulled FP from my grasp. But he looked at me. His eyes were darkened, glossed, and full of many things. None of them were good. Sadness, regret, guilt. All of the above.

I pulled against the Sheriff's arms, the look of FP's features causing my eyes to hydrate themselves a little too much. "Dad! Why are you doing this?" I was shouting a little, as the deputy's had nearly taken him out of sight down the hall. This was not normal behavior. But I was desperate. No one acts in a proud way when desperation claims their soul.

The Sheriff pulled me back a little more. He said, calmly, "Diana, please. We're just doing our jobs."

"Let go- let go of me."

I yanked free from his grasp and stepped away from him. A quick sweep up of my eyes revealed the shocked, sympathetic expressions worn by everyone I'd walked into the station with. Except Jughead. Jughead looked as though he were on the verge of tears, looking right into my eyes with a look that said the one thing I didn't need to hear—I told you so. "Diana-" Archie tried to speak. He'd stepped forward, reached out a hand.

But I ignored him. I walked right past him and out the exit, into the cold night air. This was too much. It was all too much. FP could not have killed Jason Blossom—so why would he confess? If he lied about being my father then—obviously—he was capable of lying about so much more. He'd hid it from me for at least nine years. Hiding a murder wouldn't be much harder.

Sitting at the empty breakfast table in the dining room, I'd held the crumpled paper in my hands—the proof of my unconventional route into the world. Finding out one's paternity so unexpectedly gave many options for panic. I took the more efficient, but most deadly, option. The slow killer. The panic that crept in slowly, pulling you deeper and deeper into the water, inch by inch. You hold your breath as you descend. But your head goes beneath the surface.

You only go deeper, and you need to breathe. You hold your breath until you feel like you're going to explode—and that's the moment when you lose it. When you actually panic. My head's been just above the surface all night. But it felt like it was about to get lower. I needed to talk to Ben. I needed to know what he knew. Seeing as I didn't sleep, I sat at the table until he woke up and drug himself out to the kitchen. I watched through the archway as he poured himself a cup of coffee.

"Morning," I said, my voice crackling from going unused for so long.

He startled, hard. Coffee sloshed out from not only the mug, but the pot as well. He quickly shuffled back to miss getting burned toes with a hissing sound. Breathing out heavily, he looked up at me. "Diana!" he just about whisper-yelled. "What on God's green earth are you doing home? You're supposed to be at the hospital."

There was a puddle on the floor. But he stepped around it and returned the coffee pot to the base, before walking toward the dining room. He looked disgruntled as he sat in a chair adjacent to mine. My face was less than pleased, as well. But, in my mind, I had a better reason. "Is FP Jones my biological father?" I asked, bluntly.

He took a drink from his mug then, eyes averting to the left—away from me. I stared at him, unmoving in this display of avoidance. After a moment, he put his coffee on the table. "Why would you ask such a thing?" he asked, looking at me with a confused and slightly amused expression.

With a deadpan, I slid the paper across the bare wood toward him. "A paternity test."

"You got tested?" his eyebrows popped, then narrowed, almost angrily.

"Someone tested my blood for me, when I was seven," I shook my head, sitting back in my chair. "Now answer my question, Ben. Is FP Jones my biological father?"

Ben picked up the sheet of paper, fingers on the outermost edges, holding it from his face—as though he might catch something from just being near it. He sighed, somewhat heavily, and put it down. "Diana...there's no way to say this other than yes. He is your father."

"Why wasn't I told?" I questioned, tone more bitter.

"That was between your mother and FP—I had nothing to do with it, and I don't know what kind of deal they struck up," he explained. He was speaking slightly louder, more dominantly—probably sensing my change in tone and overall emotional state. He was on defense.

I sat forward in my chair, arms crossed. "How do you know about this then, huh?"

He sighed again, sitting back. His eyes were settled on the table—a wise choice. "When your parents died, FP was going to adopt you and your sister. But I knew what kind of life you would've been having, living with him, so I did everything I could to make sure that didn't happen. I took you two myself. FP thought waving this in my face would get me to change my mind."

I'd pushed up from the table then in a burst of abrupt anger. My chair screeched on the tile as it back up. Stepping away, I scrubbed my hands over my face. It was almost laughable—what with the tense, tightening coil of rage and despair in my gut. I'd wanted nothing more than to hit something so hard whatever it was broke. But I settled for curling my fingers into fists at my sides as I paced the length of the dining room.

After a long moment of quiet, Ben spoke. "I know this is a lot to take in. Especially given recent events."

"You have no idea what this means to me—what he means to me," I turned toward him then, stopping my pace only to glare. "Living here has been my own personal hell. Don't tell me I'm a liar—just take a good, long look at my wrists. I would have been better off living with FP at the trailer park."

"Diana, please," he gave me a look, one that said I was speaking nonsense.

Soft footsteps echoed from the living room. It was Cash, coming down the stairs. She stepped into the kitchen and rubbed her little eyes, yawning quite loudly. "Good morning," she said, walking to the island. Then, with a pause, she looked my way. Her whole face pulled up, filling with joy. "DIANA!"

Her short legs carried her across the room at lightning speed. She latched onto my waist with an iron grip. It was like she'd finally caught Santa delivering presents. "Hey, Cash," I smiled down at her, exhaling to hide my stress. "How'd you sleep?"

"Great! What are you doing here?" she peered up at me through her lashes, her lips pulled into a wide smile, and I nearly broke.

With the reveal of my true identity, there was one thing I dreaded—Cash was no longer completely my sister, my blood. I had half of her. And that was all. It explained so much. Why she was always so much like dad with her youthful optimism. Why I was such a pessimist with my mother's world view. I didn't have any of my dad in me, because he wasn't my dad. Not anymore.