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Thalia Grace was born on December 22, 1991. She was declared missing on December 21, 2007, and then dead by the end of 2008.
She hadn’t found out until a few months later, when she finally decided to look up her own name on the internet and see what was going on. The news had broken when she was in between locations, wandering down a long road and hoping that the diner that was marked on the map she stole would still be there when she got there. She’d been forced to walk rural roads and unpaved paths, having turned sixteen after running away and therefore not having a driver’s license.
The original plan had been to wait at least that long, until she realized that taking a car would probably be the easiest way for the authorities to track her down, so she was going to have to walk anyway. Might as well leave as soon as she could, then. And during a time that everyone would be so distracted by the holidays that a missing girl—albeit a famous one—wouldn’t be looked for too hard.
So she hadn’t had access to the internet, and once she got to a proper city, the story had become old and was no longer on newspapers or magazines—not even a footnote, considering she read those magazines from front to back several times, them being her sole entertainment and also the only glimpse she had into what used to be her entire life. She was never sure whether she was hoping a Grace would be mentioned or the opposite.
It had been a miracle that by the time she finally made it to New York, the public had already decided that she was dead. At first, she thought she would stay away from the major cities—and for a while she did—but then she figured that if there was anywhere that child star lookalikes would go unnoticed, it would be there. And so a few months into her trip she changed the lines she drew along her maps from a small town in Virginia to New York City.
Once she arrived, she wasn’t quite sure where to go next. She’d spent a year going from one place to the next, never staying too long, always hoping that the people around her would assume she was older than she actually was—that they’d trust the fake ID she’d bought back in LA and not look too closely at her appearance, lest they match it with one they’d probably seen in movies or the news. Now, in a city that was so similar to the place she grew up in, yet so different at the same time, she was finally free.
She went to the public library to catch up on the news. She found her own obituary next to a photo of Beryl and Jason Grace at her funeral. She scrolled on, not willing to glance at the matching blonde hair and blue eyes and black clothing for too long. It was too late to turn back now.
At that point, she was seventeen and close enough to adulthood to pass for one. The escape process had been long over despite her not knowing it, having spent months hiding her face and staying away from cameras or phones because she couldn’t be sure whether they were still looking for her. It had been a fast process, apparently—too fast for someone to not have sped it up a bit on the inside.
Good. She and Beryl were on the same wavelength, then—they both wanted her dead.
And so the new life began, starting with getting rid of the old fake ID just in case that shady guy decided he wanted to cash in some evidence, and creating a new identity, this time one that would hopefully last longer than either of her past ones.
With the last of the money she had saved from her paychecks over the years (or rather, stolen from Beryl) she bought a number of brown contacts from a beauty store, along with some bleach and hair dye and earrings. She went to another store and did the same thing, not wanting to alarm any singular place with the story she was creating. Then she needed a place to stay, even though she was used to living on the streets for over a year at that point—but this time, her position was more permanent, and she wanted it to feel like that.
Luckily, so long as she had the money to pay for it and kept her standards low, finding a small apartment wasn’t hard. And she still had enough for one month of rent, which was long enough for her to find somewhere to work. So, she bleached the remaining hair on her head—she had chopped most of it off back in Arizona, and then again in Tennessee. She did it with whatever was left in the box dye package, her natural pitch black making it come out as more of a musty light brown. She put in the brown contacts for the first time, blinking a few times to get used to the feeling before realizing she probably never would, but at the very least—
She was unrecognizable.
***
July 2020
She hadn’t planned to make her identity known, ever. As time went on she found it easier to respond to her new name, when she got a job that she actually enjoyed and felt passion for, and when she made friends with people who didn’t dig too deeply into her past and appreciated her for who she was—Clio Hill, a volunteer turned manager at the Artemis Foundation who constantly changes her appearance and always opts out of group photos.
They don’t ask why she doesn’t spend the holidays with her family, or where she grew up, or how she wound up hearing about the Artemis Foundation—though she’s pretty sure that some can connect the dots that she had been helped by them before becoming a volunteer. They probably assume that there’s some hard backstory there, along with the missing family and the avoidance of any sort of deep topics, but Thalia doubts they’d be able to guess that it was just because her rather grand savings from her life as a child star were bound to run out, and though she was crafty and smart, her short-term part-time jobs weren’t enough for rent in New York, especially not when her fees included contacts and hair dye and makeup to distract from what was once a face that covered billboards and magazines for months at a time.
So for all the hardship she faced over those years hiding her childhood to be for nothing? She hadn’t ever expected that. She had always been careful about how much she associated with the people she used to know—she kept her distance from the news and the headlines.
Not for her safety—seeing an image of Jason Grace on the cover of a hit TV show that was being advertised in Times Square couldn’t lead anyone to her. It wasn’t like someone would see her walking down the street and shout out, Hey! Isn’t that that boy’s sister? The one who went missing and died twelve years ago?
It was just… better. To keep her space. Her privacy. Her mental well-being. Have everyone she knew stay at arms-length. It wasn’t like she could go tell a therapist that she’s actually a missing child, that she left her little brother in the care of a woman who had abused her for years, that she still wakes up wondering if she should have taken him as well, torn him away from a life that she doesn’t even know if he truly loves, and forced him onto the road for months, maybe over a year, and then into a tiny studio that barely fit her belongings, and then onto the streets until she finally found a women’s shelter that took her in.
She couldn’t have done that to Jason—he was too young to properly understand what he would’ve been signing up for. That’s why she hadn’t asked him. That’s why she hadn’t told him. She had mused about it sometimes, referenced the idea of running away and leaving this life behind, but he hadn’t understood—how could he? He was just a child. And it was for his own good that Thalia didn’t take him with her, because otherwise—otherwise, who knows what could have happened to him? To them? To her?
It would’ve been harder to stay undercover with a second child being searched for. Contacts always made Jason’s eyes itchy. They would’ve needed twice the money for food. They might’ve even run out of cash before making it to New York.
These are the thoughts that Thalia knows she can’t linger too long on—that’s why once she ran, she knew she couldn’t have come back. Jason wouldn’t have understood. Thalia wouldn’t have been able to support them both. And maybe—just maybe—if Beryl knew that her parenting had caused one child to run off and supposedly die, she’d ease up on Jason. Just a bit. Just enough to give Thalia some peace of mind.
It had been a risk in itself to let Zoë give her contact information to Piper McLean, someone that Thalia knows is close to Jason. She had known, of course, that they were friends even back when she was around, but she’s seen all the rumors in tabloids over the years. The pair were hard to ignore.
But she had allowed herself just this anyway, not at all wondering whether Piper would mention Jason by name once, just a simple reference to how he was doing. It had been twelve years, hadn’t it? Over a decade. People had forgotten her name by now. Piper was just a child when she last saw her.
They’d still only made contact over email and text, occasionally setting up video meetings which passed with no recognition. Piper hadn’t mentioned Jason; it had all been business. But Thalia felt a bit of relief inside her. If Piper seemed fine, she was sure that Jason would be too. They at least still had each other, and whichever other friends Thalia had seen in a few news articles she had looked up the night before—breaking her own rules, she knows, but it had been necessary. Jason had a solid friend group. He was close with his costars. He had made friends in high school.
He seemed happy.
So Thalia had left it at that, and moved on with her life, occasionally still reaching out to Piper for charity-related reasons, but she hadn’t intended to ever actually reveal herself to her. It just wasn’t an option—after so much time and effort had been put into completely separating her from who she once was, she hadn’t ever thought she’d be able to let it all go.
And then she had seen that first headline.
She doesn’t have any sort of social media accounts—she’d escaped before that was a really crucial thing for a celebrity and hadn’t ever wanted to put herself at extra risk of being found—so it ended up being an article that had popped up on her laptop on Google as she was preparing to update some spreadsheets. It had caught her eye immediately, and despite her not wanting to dig too deep into what she was sure was just some fake news published to draw clicks, she opened it.
She saw the pictures. The links to other websites, all saying the same thing with varying levels of audacity. Searching up Jason Grace’s name resulted in more of them, and then Instagram comments all sharing their opinions and Twitter threads about the evidence pointing to and against the headlines being true.
She sent the text to Piper without thinking twice. Looking back at Piper’s response, and her frantic insistence on the meeting, she still doesn’t know why she did it. She doesn’t care whether her little brother’s gay or not—well, of course she does, because it’s a part of who he is, but that’s not the part that she’s fixated on. The part that worries her, that forces her to reach out, is that she knows—a scandal like this is her mother’s worst nightmare. And whether it’s true or not, Jason—well, God, what would Jason be thinking about that?
Thalia can’t resist it. The urge to reach out. The need to know how her brother feels. Because she had distanced herself for years to keep things the way they were, assuring herself that the decision she made was right—it had to be—and that she couldn’t take it back.
Only now? The articles that spew hate or disgust toward Jason bring her back to what the tabloids said about her at the mere age of fifteen. She doesn’t know how she tolerated it for so long—maybe she never did. She’d like to think that for most of the time she was away, Jason remained in the public’s good graces. That he didn’t face that same cruelty she did, from the media or their mother.
But she can’t ignore it any longer. And if there’s any chance that her presence may make things better, offer some semblance of comfort, and not entirely ruin the life she’s created for herself and Jason over the past twelve years—then she has to take it.
There’s a person in the waiting room of the Zoom meeting. Thalia takes a moment to stare at her face— she hasn’t changed her hair from normal. It’s somewhat spiky, with an undercut that her mother would have never allowed, dyed silver-ish platinum with some blue streaks. They show off her ear piercings, of which she has too many to count, and a few small tattoos she’s got near her hairline. She left in her two eyebrow piercings but took out her nose ones, and the big difference, the one that she’s spent years hiding—are the two electric blue eyes staring back at her from the camera.
She doesn’t know if Piper will recognize them. If she’ll even notice them through the pixelated computer cameras. But Thalia can’t back out now.
It takes a moment to load, but before Thalia can think too hard about it, Piper’s face fills the screen. She looks slightly less put-together than she usually does, which is fair considering the last-minute scheduling of the meeting and what she’s probably been going through these past few days. Her hair is pulled into a messy side braid, and she’s wearing a fitted white tank top.
“Hey, Clio! So sorry I’m late, a call before this went a bit overtime.” She smiles brightly, though Thalia can guess that she probably isn’t the happiest with her right now. It takes a moment for her to think of a response, because she notices Piper blink—there’s a short hesitation, a slight squint of her eyes.
“I didn’t schedule the meeting to talk about spreadsheets,” Thalia says quickly, forcing herself to follow the script she had planned in her head. She’s spent the past two days thinking nonstop of how to best go about the conversation, how to not sound like a lunatic, how to prevent getting a restraining order placed on her. She just wants to talk to Jason.
“I’m sorry, Piper,” Thalia says before Piper can respond, holding her breath. “I haven’t been truthful about my identity—to you or to anyone else. This is going to sound wild and kind of insane, and you’ll probably be tempted to just log off immediately but I need you to hear me out—”
“Did your eye color change?” Piper cuts in, stopping Thalia in the middle of her sentence. She’s squinting again.
Thalia inhales. “I’m not wearing contacts. Usually they’re brown.”
“Oh.”
“...So, as I was saying—I needed to talk to you. About who I am.” Thalia waits a moment for Piper to respond or show some sign of disbelief, but there is none. Her eyebrows are furrowed as she examines Thalia closely.
And then, there’s no other buffer that Thalia can put up. No other explanation of the explanation that she can add on to her hesitation, to keep from saying what she came here to say. She’s being forced to finally face it.
“I’m Thalia,” she says, forcing her eyes to stay focused on Piper. “Grace. I need—I need you to let me talk to Jason.”
Piper doesn’t say anything. She barely blinks, actually, and it makes Thalia tap her foot in anticipation. She doesn’t know what she was expecting—for Piper to have a loud outburst and leave the meeting, maybe, ensuring that Jason wouldn’t ever hear about this. Maybe to ask further questions, details about Jason’s life, to prove that she was telling the truth.
But Piper just keeps staring at her, kaleidoscope eyes piercing Thalia’s soul. She stammers her way through another explanation. “I know that they said that I was dead—I ran away. I was missing for a while, I don’t know if you remember; you were so young then. I remember you. When you met Jason on that Old Navy commercial set, and you guys had that stupid scene where you had to jump up in the air and Jason said they retook it for hours and hours because for some reason there were a bunch of technical issues or the balloons kept popping or whatever.
“I ran away because—well, you’re friends with Jason. I hoped that it got better after I left. Still hope. I couldn’t—you have to understand, I couldn’t think too hard about it, I needed to make a new life for myself. I’ve lived in New York since then. I know that it seems like it’s just coming up out of the blue, and that I shouldn’t force myself into his life now, but I haven’t been able to escape the news over the past few days and all I can think about is what Beryl might be putting him through right now and if you’re still friends with him, please , I just need to see that he’s okay.”
There’s a long silence, where Thalia finally faces the screen again and looks at Piper’s gaze, which has shifted only slightly from before. Her eyebrows are more narrowed now, but there also seems to be some lingering… sadness in her eyes, mixed with probably a million other things that Thalia can’t make out over the webcam.
“He’s my little brother,” Thalia finishes weakly.
Finally, Piper flinches. It’s a sudden and short movement, and Thalia almost misses it because her eyes are starting to tear up, but she blinks it away. There’s another silence, but Thalia doesn’t fill it, instead waiting for something, anything from Piper in response.
“I…” Piper starts, then she bites her lip and shakes her head, mostly to herself. Thalia watches anxiously. She seems to be taking it both better and worse than Thalia had imagined. “... Why? ”
Thalia doesn’t respond, blinking at the question, and Piper suddenly becomes fired up, her eyes blazing and her posture straightening. “Why would you do that? Leave him? If you knew exactly why you were leaving yourself? I—I mean, what ? He’s missed you for years! Never mind leaving him with his mom, I just—how could you not let him know where you were?”
And isn’t that the question that Thalia has been avoiding all this time? She knows there’s no concrete answer. She doesn’t have a proper excuse. All she’d been able to tell herself when planning and running and leaving her life behind was that it would be for the better—there was simply no other option. “I had to leave,” she says, her voice barely above a whisper. It doesn’t even click in her head that Piper has accepted her explanation with no further proof.
“You had to leave LA, sure,” Piper says, her voice shaking. “I get it— fuck , I get it. But why would you leave him ? How could you? He still—God, he doesn’t talk about you and he doesn’t know that I know this but he still writes letters to you like you were going to come home. But he talks about you like you’re dead ! Because you are —I mean, that’s what you wanted him to believe? And now you show up wanting to know if he’s okay , I—”
Piper shakes her head again and bites her lip. She shuts her eyes tightly. “If you ever knew him, you know damn well that he’s been through hell and back these past few years. But he’s Jason, so of course he pretends like it’s nothing. Like he’s fine. And he’s able to do that for everything—his mom, and the press, and the acting, and the fuckton of stress he’s been under—but you know the one time I saw him break ? Break character on his whole life being picture perfect?” Piper opens her eyes, narrowing them into a sharp glare. “When he was telling me how much he missed his big sister. How he wished she would come back. And I—well, fuck, you’re right, of course I believed what the news said because I was just a kid. I thought Jason’s sister was dead and he was just… just grieving . But he knew, he knew you left him and he was waiting for you to come back. And you didn’t.”
Thalia feels the tears running down her cheeks but doesn’t even bother to wipe them away. She’s barely able to choke out, “I had to leave.”
“And why couldn’t you come back ?”
“I had to leave—”
“You’re twelve years too late! You think I—”
“ Fuck , Piper! You don’t know what it was like! You don’t know what I fucking went through,” Thalia finally shouts, lashing out at her screen in the desperate attempt to defend herself—maybe not her current self, but the fifteen year old girl who walked across the country with the sole motivation of escaping her mother. “Things got better after I died. I read the articles. Mom got sober, Jason got to go to school—and fuck , I know things were shit for him still but they would’ve been a hell of a lot worse if I stayed—and even worse if I came back. You don’t know what it was like. I walked from LA to New York because I was scared of someone spotting me. I was homeless for months because I ran out of money. I could barely feed just myself some days, and you think I could have brought Jason along? Or that I could suddenly return to Hollywood, make headlines all over again by showing up, and somehow not have Jason affected by the fallout even more than me disappearing?”
Thalia takes a deep breath, shaking her head sharply. Tears fly off her cheeks. “She would’ve only tightened her grip on him. I wouldn’t have been able to take care of him—I couldn’t return to LA and that was all he’s ever known. It would’ve hurt him more. It would’ve hurt me more—it would have killed me . I had to leave.”
Thalia doesn’t watch Piper for her response. “Please. You don’t have to understand. You don’t even have to forgive me. I don’t forgive myself. But I—I couldn’t stay there. And I couldn’t come back,” Thalia blinks more tears from her eyes, shaking her head as if Piper hadn’t just stabbed her exactly where she hurt most. She thinks of Jason, years earlier, when the grief was fresh, knowing that Thalia wasn’t dead. The one thing that she had thought she’d protected Jason from—the feeling of abandonment—and yet apparently she hadn’t even done that.
“But I’m here now. That has to count for something.”
She looks straight at Piper, whose glare has softened since Thalia last looked at her. She still doesn’t look remotely as welcoming as she had at the beginning of the meeting.
A few seconds later, she responds quietly, her voice barely a murmur. “I’ll tell him first. If—and only if—he wants to speak with you, I’ll give him your number.”
Piper pauses another moment, hesitating. “Just please don’t hurt him again. I—I want the same thing as you, Thalia. I want him to be okay.”
***
Piper McLean
Today 12:02 PM
its a good thing you usually wear brown contacts btw
i knew you were familiar
i missed you too yk. you were kinda like the big sister that i never had for the time you were there
I missed you too.
***
Dear Thalia,
I don’t even know how to respond to what Piper told me. I wanted to call you immediately - I told Piper to give me the phone number because I’ve been waiting twelve years for you to come back, and now you finally did. But I don’t think I’d be able to put it into words how surreal speaking to you would be. And I’m not sure I’d be able to even think coherently when hearing your voice again. It probably sounds completely different now. I used to wonder whether I’d recognize you if I ever saw you again, and after Piper showed me some pictures, I think that I would. Or at least, I’d like to think that. I’ll never really know.
Either way, this letter probably doesn’t make any sense. Piper might have mentioned it, but I’ve been writing letters for years now. I never had an address to send them to, but now I do - so below this are pictures of every letter I’ve written since you left. Or at least, Leo’s adding them all to a word document as I write this.
I know you’re still in New York, and there’s still quarantine, but I can’t wait to see you again. Piper also told me that she got a bit mad at you for leaving, but I don’t care. I really don’t. All I’ve ever wanted was to see you again. And the acting stuff is all getting figured out anyway. It’s a long story. I’ll tell you about it over the phone.
But things are looking up. I’m doing alright, seriously. I know you probably won’t believe that, but I think you’ll see in the letters that I’m doing better now. It was tough at first. That’s when I wrote the most. I wish you hadn’t left, but I know you couldn’t stay. And I’m alright with that, now. I think there’s some anger in the earlier letters - I never re-read them after writing them, so I’m sorry to say I’m not entirely sure, but that was before I met some people that really changed my life. I’d love for you to meet them one day.
Call me when you finish reading.
Love,
Jason
***
Unknown Number
Today 4:21 PM
[ PDF Attachment: -jason ]
You changed Unknown Number ’s name to Jason
Today 5:46 PM
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