Elliott waits until I finish. Then he says, “So even if Freeman’s BAC was over the legal limit, he’s not guilty of manslaughter, because his driving didn’t cause the accident. Yours did.”
“Thanks for pointing that out,” I say tightly.
“I’m just trying to understand why you’re hurting so badly.”
“Because I killed Dallas.” A new wave of tears starts to fall. “I took him away from millions of fans. I cut short what would have undoubtedly been this epic life. And then when I realized what I had done, I let someone else take the blame. Everything that has happened—Freeman being threatened, innocent people being harassed, a freaking building set on fire—is my fault.”
Elliott wraps his free arm around me and pulls me in close. I bury my face in his chest, sobbing into the soft fabric of his T-shirt. He doesn’t tell me it’s okay. He doesn’t tell me to stop crying. All he says is “I’m right here. I’m not leaving.”
After I calm down, I tell him how my mom explained what happened in the hospital, but I didn’t remember much about that night so I couldn’t give the police any specific information. “It’s not like I purposely implicated him.” I wipe at my eyes. “But then I got online and started reading about the accident. And Shannon—that’s my best friend—has been texting me stuff. That day by the Visitor Center restrooms was right after I finally pieced together what happened.”
“So why didn’t you tell the police then?”
“I don’t know,” I say miserably. “No, that’s another lie. I didn’t tell them because I was scared. I had read the things people were saying online about Brad Freeman and I didn’t want that to be me. Do you know what it’s like to see people reducing someone to a series of hashtags? Horrible ones like #Murderer and #HumanWaste?”
“Well, I doubt they would have been that cruel with you,” Elliott says.
“Why? Because I’m a girl?”
“Because you weren’t drinking and driving.”
“Come on,” I scoff. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned from the internet, it’s that people can always find a reason to judge someone. They were calling Freeman a murderer long before the toxicology reports went public.” I shake my head bitterly. “I read the news articles published the day after the accident and the whole world had already made up its mind. No one gave a shit about the truth. They just wanted someone to blame.” My voice wavers. “I didn’t want to be that someone.”
Elliott nods. “So does falling asleep driving make you legally responsible?”
“Not criminally,” I say. “Not in Missouri, anyway. There are a couple of states where drowsy driving is a crime, but I think even those stipulate that the person behind the wheel has to have gone without sleep for twenty-four hours or something.”
“So then it was just an accident, right?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t feel like an accident. Accidents are things that are unpreventable. It feels like my fault. I should have known better. I should have known not to drive if I was tired. Especially not someone else’s car. Especially not when it was dark and rainy.” I sigh deeply. “If I wasn’t so jealous and insecure, we never would have been on the road in the first place. The fact that falling asleep isn’t an official crime in Missouri is just a technicality. It doesn’t make me any less guilty.”
“You couldn’t have predicted what was going to happen.” Elliott squeezes my hand.
“When the charges were dropped, I was relieved, you know? I figured people would leave Freeman alone finally. That they’d begin to make peace with the idea that Dallas was gone.” I shake my head. “I was so wrong.”
“Know what else you were wrong about?”
“What’s that?”
“I’m still here,” Elliott says.
“But why?” I bury my face in my pillow. “I’m the worst kind of liar, one who does something wrong and lets someone else take the blame.”
“No. That might be what you did, but it’s not who you are. You were in a horrible accident, and then you were scared and everyone starting jumping to conclusions and issuing judgments and threatening people. I understand why you didn’t want to tell the truth. Just like I can see how badly you want to come clean now.” He pulls the pillow away from my face. “So do it. And I promise I’ll still be here.”
“I do want to tell the truth. I’ve wanted to since that day we hiked Angels Landing. I felt moved up there; I felt guided.” I bite my lip. “But it’s harder to feel God in my bedroom when I’m reading endless hate on the internet, so then I got scared again.” I suck in a deep breath. “Yesterday I finally reached my breaking point. I decided to tell my dad, but he’s in Salt Lake City for work until tomorrow.”
“Are you going to tell him when he gets home?”
“Yeah.” I pause. “If you’ve known who I was this whole time, why didn’t you say something?”
“Well, considering that you put a fake name on your name tag and didn’t mention anything, it seemed clear that you didn’t want anyone to know. I didn’t want you to be uncomfortable around me. I could see you were struggling, so I kept trying to give you an opening to confide in me.”
I think back to the way he called me Jennifer on the Angels Landing trail, to the way he asked about my scar and joked that meeting Garrett meant I knew someone famous now. He’d been trying to get me to talk to him this whole time.
I tighten my grip on Elliott’s hand. “I’m scared I won’t be able to handle it when everyone knows the truth. What if the whole world hates me?”
“First of all, you’re stronger than you think,” Elliott says. “When you start to doubt yourself, remember the gym. You did better than you expected. Everyone is capable of more than they know. Second, the whole world is not going to hate you. Some people will understand why you remained quiet. Those people will respect you for coming forward.”
“But other people are going to say horrible things about me for the rest of my life. I’ll never escape this. What happens when I apply to med school, when I go to get a job? Hospitals will Google me and find out I’m the worst kind of liar. It’s always going to be out there.”
“If you’re that scared, you could always tell people that you just got your memory back,” Elliott suggests.
I mull the idea over in my head. It’s tempting, but it would just be me earning all those hashtags that have been chasing me for the past couple of weeks. #Liar. #Coward. #Hypocrite. “No. I don’t want to fix a lie with another lie.”
“Well, I think people like deans and doctors will appreciate the fact you found the courage to do the right thing. Sure, maybe some of Dallas’s rabid fans will hate you, but you don’t have to give those people any bandwidth. Just block them.”
“I canceled all my social media accounts, but it’s impossible to insulate yourself from everything. Maybe some night I’ll be feeling ashamed and go looking for what people are saying about me because I think I need a little extra punishment.”
“You don’t need more punishment,” Elliott says. He strokes the scar on my cheek again. “You almost died. You ran away from your friends. You tormented yourself with guilt. Enough is enough.” He turns my body around so that his chest is pressed against my back and his top arm is curled protectively over my waist. For a moment, I worry that he does feel differently after hearing my confession, that he’s moved me so he doesn’t have to look into my eyes. But then he lifts up just long enough to kiss me on the cheek. “I’m here,” he says. “I’m not leaving.”
“Thank you for not leaving.” I relax back into the warmth of his body. It feels so comforting. But even that feels wrong. “Maybe you should leave,” I whisper. “I don’t deserve this.”
“Shh,” Elliott says. “Just rest.”
A few more tears trickle down my cheeks, but these ones aren’t from sadness. “Why are you so wonderful?” I ask. “Is this even real?”
Elliott pinches me gently on the arm. “This is real. My feelings are real.” He brushes my hair back from my neck and presses his lips to my skin.
A tremor runs through me. “When you said you did bad things, were you just trying to make me feel better?”
Elliott shakes his head. “I’ve done multiple bad things, but the one thing I’ll always regret has to do with my sister, Monica.”
I roll back around so we’re facing each other. “I didn’t know you had a sister. Was she also adopted?”
“Yeah.” Elliott blinks hard. “We grew up in Sacramento. When I was fifteen, Monica moved to New York to join a fancy ballet company. We kept in touch via email, and at first all her messages were happy and excited. She loved New York, she’d made new friends, she was doing well in the company. But after a few months, her messages started to get a lot more negative. She always seemed stressed out, like she worried constantly about getting kicked out of the company. She told me not to tell Garrett and Ezra because she didn’t want them to know she wasn’t happy, or to try to interfere on her behalf. Some of the stories she told me about her exercise requirements and dietary restrictions shocked me, but I figured maybe she was exaggerating—everyone likes to complain about their jobs, right? I told her I couldn’t believe she would put herself through so much just to be a dancer, but that I admired her dedication and perseverance. Whenever she seemed discouraged, I just told her I was proud of her for chasing her dreams. We were all so proud of her.”
“What happened?” I whisper.
“She collapsed during a performance. Her heart gave out. Something about massive electrolyte imbalance and muscle wasting from starving herself. She died. I wish I had listened, really listened, instead of just encouraging her to keep going. Then maybe I would have seen she was in actual trouble, that she was reaching out to me, not just griping about her job.”
“Elliott,” I say softly. “You were fifteen. You didn’t know.”
“Yeah,” he says. “For the longest time, I didn’t tell my dads about her emails. I was positive they would blame me for her death. My grades dropped. I quit sleeping. They thought it was depression from losing Monica. Eventually my birth mom convinced me to tell them that I was blaming myself, and although there was a lot of shock and pain that day, it was only then that the three of us started to heal.”
“I am so sorry,” I say. “And I know how inadequate those words are.”
He nods. “Monica also loved to paint. She had never been to Zion, but a friend sent her a postcard once and she got kind of obsessed with the place. She used to paint it all the time in high school. Garrett and Ezra kept saying we were all going to go, but everyone was so busy that it never happened. After her funeral, the three of us came up here to spread her ashes. And we never left.” He swallows back a lump in his throat. “I never planned on going to college in St. George. Eventually I’ll have to transfer if I want to go to vet school, but it’s . . . hard to leave my family. It’s been over three years, but it still feels raw.”
I twine my fingers through his. My turn to not let go. For a few minutes, neither of us speaks. Finally I say, “So you talk to your birth mom?”
Elliott toys with the pendant beneath his collar. “Yeah. It was an open adoption. She lives in Alaska, but we email a lot.”
“So you’re not mad at her for giving you away?”
“No. I mean, it hurts to think that my birth was scary and stressful for my own mom. But she had me when she was fifteen. She was living with her mom and they didn’t have much money. Giving me up was the right thing for everyone. How could I possibly hold it against her when I’m nineteen and I’m being raised by two amazing parents with ample resources to support me, and I still can’t imagine trying to be a dad right now.”
“You are pretty lucky,” I say. “What about your birth dad?”
“Not in the picture,” Elliott says. “But like I said, I kind of hit the dad jackpot, so I don’t need a third one.”
“Have you ever met your mom or grandmother?”
He shakes his head. “My grandmother passed away, but my mom still lives in Anchorage. I definitely want to get up there to visit her someday and hopefully learn more about my Inuit heritage.”
“Did she give you that?” I point at the deer pendant around his neck.
He nods. “It’s a caribou. My great-grandmother carved it. It’s one of the only things I have from my mom’s side of the family.”
“It’s beautiful,” I say, leaning in for a closer look. I swallow back a yawn.
Elliott yawns. “Sharing secrets is tiring, huh?”
“It sure is.”
“But do you feel better?”
“I do.” I feel depleted, dehydrated from shedding so many tears, but for once my chest has stopped hurting. I can breathe without pain. And muscles I’ve been holding tense for weeks are finally starting to relax.
“Me too.” He leans over and kisses me on the forehead. “Do you want me to stay?”
I imagine what it would be like to spend the entire night wrapped in Elliott’s arms, to fall asleep not feeling afraid or ashamed for once. I want that, but I don’t think I deserve it. Not until I tell everyone the truth. “Yes, but that might be pressing our luck with Rachael.”
“What if I stay until you fall asleep, and then sneak out?”
I don’t deserve that either, but I can’t resist. “Okay.”
As I lay my head on Elliott’s chest and let my eyes fall shut, doing the right thing feels a little less scary. If he didn’t condemn me, maybe there are other people out there who will understand why I didn’t come forward. Maybe there are even other struggling people, ones who if they see me do the right thing might find the courage to do the right thing too. This is about more than me and Dallas and Brad Freeman. This is about not being afraid to speak up. This is about making my voice heard.