Clay’s confession is so like him—low-key but also completely fearless. There’s no way I can offer less. I can’t believe I’m about to do this, but one part of my resolve hasn’t changed. While I can’t reveal Creepy Jack’s identity, I’m unloading the rest.
I start with dying in a field and waking up in the hospital … as Morgan. There’s also some rambling about Morgan’s secrets, the scary older-man lover, and how I’m so completely unequipped to deal with any of it. The whole recitation doesn’t take as long as I expected, a little less than ten minutes. Clay’s hand stills on my shoulder, and I’m afraid to look at him.
“This older guy, he’s the one who hurt you tonight?” Trust Clay to focus on that. He’s put a pin in the rest.
“Yeah. Well, I acquired the scrapes and scratches running away from him. But he definitely jumped in my car and scared me out of it. He stole it afterward, and—shit. He might have my phone, too.” That’s a problem I just registered, and now I’m freaking out. If he cracks my password, there’s no limit to the damage he can do.
Clay reaches for his, currently charging on the side table and dials. I clench my teeth, half hoping Creepy Jack will answer. A few seconds later, I hear the voice mail message, so that proves nothing. I might be delusional, a girl who imagines monsters and hurts herself running from them. Or damn, there’s even a syndrome about people who wound themselves for attention.
The silence grows until I can’t stand it. I finally muster my courage and peer up at him, but he’s staring blankly at the portfolio page. It’s too much. He doesn’t believe me.
“This is a lot to take in,” he says quietly. “You have to admit, it sounds—”
“Crazy. I know. That’s why I haven’t said anything before.”
“Why tell me?”
“You noticed a difference on your own, didn’t you? That’s part of it. But … I can’t be with you unless you know everything. It’s too big a lie for me to live with.”
Clay cups my cheek in his hand and searches my gaze, though what he’s looking for I have no idea, maybe some inner conviction or a febrile gleam in my eyes. I hold the look steadily, but my heart beats so hard it almost hurts. I’m dying for someone to believe me; this isn’t a mental disorder, a grief-induced denial, or any other explicable psychiatric phenomenon.
“I know you believe what you’re saying,” he starts, but I can’t deal with his tone.
It’s the way you talk to a toddler who’s about to jam a fork in the light socket. In reaction I scoot away and lean against the wall where the headboard would be, putting two feet between us. He doesn’t follow.
Great. I’m no longer the girl he wants to make out with. Now he thinks I desperately need mental help. At this point he might not believe me about Creepy Jack either if I told him that the guy’s a respected local politician with a wife and two kids. Though I predicted this outcome weeks ago, the disappointment still stings.
Quietly I rack my brain for something that might convince him, but before Liv’s death—how weird to think of myself in third person—I didn’t have that much to do with Clay. To me he was just Nathan’s slightly scary older brother, who I didn’t know at all, and I disapproved of him on principle, based on secondhand bullshit. Now I’m ashamed of how I misjudged him without understanding anything.
Then it occurs to me—an event that predates Nathan, small and random—nothing that I would’ve mentioned to Morgan. “One time early in my freshman year, you were out behind the Dumpsters with some people who were smoking. Later, when the garbage caught fire, they blamed you. But you definitely weren’t one of the smokers, so I told the vice principal that it wasn’t you.”
Clay glances at me, his brows arcing. “What were you doing behind the school?”
I suspect he didn’t notice me back then. When he was a junior, he hung out with the bad kids, the ones who probably wouldn’t graduate and didn’t care either. They didn’t attend school functions or join clubs. Half of them ended up in juvie before they graduated, and another quarter dropped out, Clay among them.
“Morgan dared me.”
It had seemed so audacious to circle the school as a freshman, spying on all the groups who would kick my ass if they caught me poking around. People always took me as Morgan’s shadow, and I didn’t fight that classification until I developed a giant crush on Nathan Claymore.
His lack of response indicates that this isn’t compelling evidence.
But then he says, “I saw Liv that day. Tiny cut-offs, right? I remember because those were definitely not compliant with the school dress code.”
My eyes widen as I fight a blush. “Yeah.”
“You’re saying Liv got me off the hook? Because you’re right, they had me pegged for a three-day suspension until someone cleared me.”
“Not Liv. Me. Why would I have told Morgan about it? More to the point, why would she remember years later if she wasn’t personally involved?” Eager to establish credibility, I add, “Look, I can answer any question you ask that Liv would know the answer to. Try me.”
“Most shit Liv knew, I wouldn’t,” Clay says tiredly.
By his expression, he doesn’t want to play this game with me. He’d rather take me home and report me as mentally unsound to those better suited to look after me. Tears pool in my eyes and trickle out the corners because this was such a huge step and it required all my courage. I suspect this won’t end until I’m taking heavy meds. Angrily I swipe away the evidence that he’s hurt me and move to slide off the bed.
But he catches my wrist with a gentle hand. “One day I scared Liv while she was pouring lemonade. What glass did she break and when was it?”
Afraid to hope, I raise my gaze to his. “It was a glass a bit taller than a Mason jar, rim around the top, and it had sunflowers on it. As for when, it was, like, eight months ago.” Wracking my brain, I still can’t come up with the date. “Just before Christmas, I’m pretty sure.”
I had stayed later than usual and Clay came home from work a little early, startling me when he popped in the back door. The glass hit the floor and shattered everywhere. I felt bad, too, because they had a matched set of four, and my mom had taken me to enough rummage sales collecting Depression glass that I knew value when I saw it. Maybe it wasn’t fancy crystal, but certain patterns were rare these days.
“Nathan wasn’t in the room,” he says then. “Liv told you?”
I shake my head patiently. “No, I was there. I tried to clean it up but you said I’d just cut myself. Which I thought was churlish but in retrospect, I’m guessing you were genuinely worried.” Perception makes all the difference in how words come across. What I took for curt annoyance back then probably was quiet concern.
Clay nods, his expression troubled. “This … this is weird.”
“Tell me about it.”
And I haven’t even mentioned the late-breaking development, where I’ve started getting trickles of memories that I’m sure belong to Morgan. What I’m experiencing isn’t like any kind of amnesia I’ve ever heard of—how can I possibly know so much about Liv and so little about the person whose body I’m occupying? Doubtless, mental health professionals could rationalize it somehow and give my condition a name. If there isn’t one, maybe they’ll name it after me: Frost-Burnham Syndrome.
“In February of this year, Nathan and I were fighting when you came over. What were we arguing about?”
“The cable bill. Nathan ordered four Pay-Per-View movies without telling you and you were pissed and he said it was only twenty bucks, so you should take the stick out of your ass and stop being such a cheapskate, and you said—”
“He can buy whatever the hell he wants when he’s earning his own money.” His face is pale, his eyes wide.
I spot the first glimmer of belief in his gold-green eyes and it heartens me. “Yes. Ask more. Any little thing that’s happened here, the more trivial the better, the less likely I’d have mentioned it to Morgan. And I’ll know, I know it all.”
“Not because Liv told you,” he grates out.
“Because I’m Liv. This is a lot to take in, I get that.”
Clay opens his fingers and releases my wrist. At first I don’t understand and I knee-walk toward him, so unbelievably relieved that someone is finally ready to accept my impossible truth. But he recoils and crosses the room, backing all the way up to his desk, and then he leans on it like he needs the support.
He won’t look at me.
“What’s wrong?”
“I damn well wish you were crazy. Because … if I accept this as truth and you are Liv, you don’t get that this”—he gestures between us—“is impossible? Your grieving family aside, my brother is breaking his heart over you right now. Liv is … and always will be Nathan’s girl. And you made me…” Here, Clay’s voice breaks. “You made me want you, too.”
“I’m sorry,” I whisper.
“That was cruel, whoever you are. Instead of me, you should’ve told Nathan. You’re the one girl in the whole world that I can’t touch, no matter how I feel or what I want.”
“But I chose you.”
His eyes close as if my words hurt, each one carving deep like a blade. “Even if you never tell anyone else, I’ll know. And I can’t do that to him, you understand? He loves you.”
I swallow hard, hardly able to get the protest out. “So do you. Before, you said nothing could change that.”
Haunted eyes lock on mine for an endless moment; it’s like he’s memorizing me. Clay’s pain is palpable, matching my own, so his reply doesn’t surprise me. “Nothing but this.”