#wttco

Life in general hadn’t changed much for Juliet since turning eighteen, not that she had really expected it to. The birthday had come and gone much like any of the seventeen before it. She’d spent the day with Ruben, a tradition since they were kids and found out they shared the day, and then gotten dinner with her family and JM, the whole day not much different than her seventeenth birthday had been. Her parents had been slightly unsettled by this one, though, a fact that she hadn’t even noticed, too busy with her own happiness to notice that something has been off with them for the past month, like they were holding onto something, biting their tongues and trying to find the best way to spill. 

“Jules?” Mr. Jacobs inquired of his eldest daughter softly as she sat reading on the couch one late September afternoon. 

Juliet looked up from her book to find both her parents standing over her, looking nervous. “Yes?” she responded, sitting up a little straighter and closing her book. It felt like forever since her parents had looked at her like this, if ever. 

Mr. and Mrs. Jacobs sat down across from their daughter. Mrs. Jacobs took her daughter’s hand while her husband announced that they needed to talk.

“Is everything okay?” Juliet questioned, suddenly unsettled herself, and looking around nervously as if the answer would just pop out of her surroundings. “Is it Ophelia or Lysander? Did something happen?” she asked, her eyebrows furrowing in concern. 

“Your brother and sister are fine,” Mrs Jacob reassured, giving Juliet a small smile. “This is about you.”

The girl’s eyes widened ever so slightly as she looked at her parents sitting before her so solemnly. “Me?” she inquired, her eyes darting back and forth between her mother and father. “Did I do something?”

Mrs. Jacobs gave her daughter another sad smile. “No, of course not, sweetie. You’re perfect.”

“We’ve been trying to decide how to tell you,” Mr. Jacobs interjected before Juliet could ask anymore questions. “In fact, we said we were going to tell you on your birthday, but we decided against it at the last minute,” he rambled a little. 

Juliet continued to just look back and forth between her parents as they looked at each other, both seeming to be waiting for the other to say what needed to be said. “What is it?” 

“Juliet, you’re adopted,” Mr. Jacobs said finally, following it with a little sigh of relief. 

“Is this a joke?” Juliet questioned, looking again between her parents for some kind of tell that they were just screwing with her. They had to be lying. But then again, they’d never lied to her before, and they weren’t exactly pranksters. “Oh my god,” she managed eventually, her face falling into her hands on her lap. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Mrs. Jacobs gave her daughter another sad smile. “Because you’re our child, just like Ophelia or Lys and we didn’t want you to feel any differently,” she responded, a note of desperation in her voice as she hoped that Juliet would understand. “If we had thought for even a minute you felt out of place and we could have explained, we would have told you everything, but you just always belonged here and we didn’t want to disrupt that.”