Resurrected (Resurrected Series Book 1) by S. M. Schmitz Page A

wasn’t just her memories, but her feelings and behavior and … look around. None of this is even mine. I don’t know if she’s me or I’m her or we’re both, I just know I’m not me. I just wanted to see the city because it all seemed so real and everything else had already been exactly the way she remembered it …”
    “What else?” we both asked her at the same time. She looked from Lydia to me then back again.
    “Aren’t you going to drink that?” Lottie pointed at the other wine glass that Lydia still hadn’t touched.
    “Lottie. What else? You’ve done this before?”
    “This is a really good wine. You should try it, Lydia.”
    “Lottie, what else?”
    “Well, there are other places we’ve been to.”
    “Like where?”
    “Wait, she doesn’t know why you live here?” I asked. Lottie glared at me and I moved the wine bottle out of her reach.
    “Here? What does he mean?” Lydia asked.
    “I grew up here.”
    It was the first time I had heard her use a first person pronoun when talking about Lottie’s life. It took both Lydia and me by surprise. Maybe all of us.
    “You mean Lottie grew up here?” Lydia’s voice had risen at least two octaves. She was nearing hysterics.
    I pushed the wine glass slowly across the table. “I won’t bite. Seriously. Drink. These feel like real crystal. They’ll shatter you know.” Lottie suppressed a smile. Lydia just looked confused.
    Lottie shrugged, her attention still on Lydia. “Isn’t that what I said?”
    “No, you said, ‘ I grew up here.’ You most certainly did not. You grew up with me. You remember that, don’t you?”
    I hadn’t thought it was possible, but Lydia’s voice had risen another octave. I drank her wine instead.
    “Of course, I just misspoke. It’s no big deal.” But Lottie looked like she was definitely uncomfortable with the idea of having misspoken at all, no matter how much she tried to reassure her friend now.
    “Why would you move us to a city where you knew she had grown up? You wanted to come here! This was your idea!”
    Lottie ran her fingers along the edge of her wine glass, growing more and more uneasy the longer this inquisition lasted. I wanted to help her, but how? I couldn’t even get Lydia to drink. In fact, I had done the exact opposite of that. I had finished her glass of wine. “For the same reason I went to Houston. Sometimes, I don’t know where her life ends and mine begins.”
    We both stared at Lottie silently after that, both with very different thoughts weighing on us. Lottie’s death was supposed to have meant a new life for them, maybe an exciting one, although I failed to see how working at a chain bookstore or driving a Yaris would qualify as exciting. But Lottie’s death had also been a sort of death for Lydia’s best friend, hadn’t it? She would never be Kyrieana again either. At least, I selfishly hoped not. If there were some loophole, some way to extinguish whatever part of Lottie had resurfaced, then I didn’t want them to find it. I wanted Lottie back.
    Lydia finally spoke, quiet, still so patient, loving. Unendingly kind. No, I could never mistake her for Jamie. “You went looking for … him, then?”
    “No, I told you, that was an accident. It was a stupid, stupid mistake on my part. I wasn’t even going to go anywhere near where I might run into him, but I was driving around and not really paying attention to where I was going, and then I looked over, and there was this coffeehouse, and I used to love it, so I just stopped …” she had caught herself this time, that first-person pronoun slipping out again before she could stop it. She picked up her wine glass and finished it off.
    “But you didn’t think he might be there?”
    “Dietrich.” I offered. I was getting annoyed by the constant references to myself in the third person like I wasn’t there.
    “Oh, sorry. Dietrich, I mean. You didn’t think he would be there?”
    Close enough.
    Lottie shook her head. “No,