Chapter Thirty-Seven
THE TALE IS as old as time—boy meets girl. Boy saves girl. Boy leaves.
A broken heart was usually the souvenir, but I was worried that he’d left behind something more. Worried, and maybe a little hopeful. Two months at home was long enough to know I was late but not long enough to show. If I were pregnant, he would come back, he would support me. That much I knew for sure, even if he never let me in emotionally, not really.
Girl pees on stick, the part the stories left out.
My gaze darted around the small bathroom, from the clean white tile to the bland oceanside print on the wall—anywhere but the little piece of plastic sitting on the back of the toilet. Finally, stomach a tight knot, I glanced at the pregnancy test.
And the screen was…blank.
Ugh.
It had probably been three seconds since I peed on it and set it down, not two minutes. My heart was racing so fast it was making time go slowly. I was going to go crazy like this.
I looked at the necklace in my hand. It had been my birth mother’s, a small and fragile legacy—the only piece I had of her. Suddenly it made me angry, the way she could have thrown me away, the way she still didn’t care. What was the point of blood if it didn’t protect me?
Philip had protected me.
Furious now, almost trembling with it, I took the necklace to the bathroom adjoining my bedroom. The old necklace hardly shone over the dull matting. It was a memento of my burnt heritage and the terrible ordeal I’d just come back from. Violence. Pain. Abandonment.
This necklace was everything that I hated.
I dropped it into the toilet and watched it sink to the bottom. It looked so innocuous there.
Harmless.
With shaking fingers I flushed the toilet. Water swirled violently, turning the gold chain into a whip contained in white porcelain. Then it disappeared in a noisy whoosh.
And just like that I wanted it back, the only connection I had to a birth mother who didn’t want me.
The only connection I had to a mysterious, powerful man who hadn’t wanted me either.
Without looking at the little test, I left the small room and shut the door behind me. Then I sat down right outside it, like I could barricade the truth inside with my body, hold it in somehow. Truth that might bring Philip back to me, truth that might fulfill his worst fears.
The woman that Philip had tried to do right by… I didn’t blame her for rejecting Philip, for trying to build a more stable life for herself and her child. And the fact that it hadn’t worked, the fact that she had died in childbirth—that as a tragedy. One that her father, Barnes, lived with every day. One that ate him from the inside out.
I wrapped my arms around my knees and tucked my chin on top.
Downstairs I could hear my mother baking. This from the woman who had stopped at the grocery store for cupcakes on the way to school for a bake sale.
I had half expected her to disown me completely once she learned the truth about who had taken Tyler, that it had been his connection to me that endangered him. But she had rallied around me instead, some long-dormant maternal instinct deciding the world was a scary place and that we both needed her at home.
My father had come slinking back a few days after we had returned, but my mother had told him to leave. Even if they hadn’t been the reason for Tyler’s experience, his debts could hurt any one of us again. He hadn’t even had the strength to stand by us when it happened.
So it was just the three of us, struggling to form some kind of new order. My mother still fretted over my brother the most, but that was okay. She tried to talk to me, too, now—stilted, sweet moments that I had longed for once upon a time.
But I couldn’t tell her about this, about what I was waiting for now. It was too personal.
The hallway door opened, and my brother stepped out. He took one look at me and one look at the closed door behind me, and his face paled.
“Is…anyone in there?” he asked.
“You can’t use it,” I replied quickly, unable to say more.
He must have figured it out because he swallowed hard. “Ella…”
“Don’t.”
His eyes closed on a pained expression. Then he sat down beside me, his back against the wall beside the bathroom door. He was standing guard with me, keeping the truth out for a few extra seconds. “Thanks,” I whispered.
“Don’t,” he said.
I turned to him, really studying him for maybe the first time since I had been back. For maybe the first time ever. He looked like a regular teenage boy—cute, if I could be objective about it. Lanky in that way that would definitely fill out well over the next couple of years.
There hadn’t been a mark on him when we’d gotten back. No injuries. And he swore that Marco hadn’t hurt him that way. I still wasn’t sure whether I believed him. Marco had shown that he was not above using sex to get what he wanted, considering what had happened with Adrian. But then again, hurting Tyler wouldn’t have hurt Philip—he was only a hook used to pull Philip to him. So maybe he had made it out okay.
“How are you doing?” I asked softly.
He ran a hand over his face. “Not you too.”
I gave him a small smile. “Mom on your case?”
I knew how stifling her concern could be, but also how sweet. How important it had once been to me. So necessary that I’d once done anything to get it, beseeching and then rebelling.
“I know they’re just trying to help,” he said. “But I can’t talk about it.”
“Then don’t talk about it. You don’t owe anyone an explanation.”
He swallowed. “Actually I do. I owe you an explanation. And…an apology.”
My heart clenched at the raw guilt in his voice. “No, Tyler, you didn’t—”
“I did,” he nearly shouted. Then he lowered his voice. “I did, Ella. I made this happen.”
I studied him, the pain in his expression, the handsome face and skin that had been unbruised by this experience. There were questions, but I wouldn’t have forced him to answer them, knowing how painful that could be. He had a right to his secrets. A right to his pain, whatever form it had taken. Or so I’d thought. “Okay,” I said more slowly. “How?”
“I wasn’t—” His voice broke, but his expression grew determined. He took a deep breath. “I wasn’t kidnapped. At least, not against my will.”
He glanced at me warily, as if expecting me to suddenly burst out yelling. I didn’t understand enough for that. “What are you talking about? Why were you gone?”
“My friend Chris—you remember him? He started going to these underground parties. I went with him a few times, and I wasn’t really… I didn’t really fit into that scene.”
I stayed silent, remembering the boy I’d seen going into the Meat Market that night. Had that been him?
“And then one day I met this guy.” A short laugh. “He ran into me actually. Then he offered to buy me a shot to make up for it. He was older and confident and…and hot.”
I flinched, already imagining where this was going. A tale as old as time. “Marco?”
“Yeah. Yeah. At first I didn’t know who he was, that he had any idea who I was.”
“When did you find out?”
“One time when I was at his apartment I found some newspaper clippings about Philip Murphy. I still wouldn’t have put it together, but there were pictures of you. Photographs, taken from far away.”
“God, Tyler.”
“I know. I think up until that point…I mean, I didn’t know. I didn’t understand any of it. Maybe I didn’t want to understand. Because he explained it all to me, and I just…believed him.”
My throat was tight. “What did he say?”
“That Philip had taken what was his. I mean, that part wasn’t hard to believe. Everyone knows that Philip Murphy is a criminal. And I knew that Marco didn’t have… much. I mean, it seemed like a lot to someone like me, still living at home. His own apartment, a job. That kind of thing. But it wasn’t a stretch to imagine that Philip had hurt him the way he said.”
“Right,” I said, wishing I could totally believe it. But there were still too many questions, questions that I now had a right to ask. I just didn’t want to. “So you didn’t know. That’s…that’s okay, then. We’re okay.”
Tyler had been the only person really there for me. The way our mother now hounded Tyler about how he was doing, whether he was okay…she hadn’t done that for me. They’d pretended like I didn’t exist, the dark shadows under my eyes a threat to their happy existence. It had been a relief when I moved into the dorm. Without me around they could pretend that they had never owed a debt so big and so bad that armed men had dragged their daughter from a club, used me to satisfy the debt. Without me they could pretend that they had never adopted a daughter they didn’t end up wanting. Only Tyler had held me in the bathroom while I’d cried.
“No,” he said, sounding hoarse. “Because he also said that you… I had told him about you. Personal things. Secret things. How I had always been jealous of you.”
“Wait a minute. What?”
“God, Ella. You’re so strong, so confident. You can do whatever you want, and it doesn’t matter what our parents say or think. You’re just you.”
The words hit me like bricks, pushing the breath right out of me. That he could look at me and see something good, something strong, when I’d thought I was weak all along. Weak and hungry for love.
“And me,” he continued, sharp with self-derision. “I don’t even know who I am or what I am. And if I so much as stand up, Mom and Dad would clap for me—like I’m some kind of idiot who needs all this extra support just to…just to exist.”
So my parents’ favoritism had managed to fuck up both of us. Awesome. “Tyler, you’re young. You don’t have to know everything you’re doing right now.”
“Only two years younger than you,” he reminded, and then he shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. I mean, you’re amazing, but I should have just—I should have just left it at that. And not compared us. Marco had this whole thing about how you were screwing me over, just like Philip had screwed him over. And I knew, I knew even then that it was wrong, but I was just so wrapped up in him that I would have believed anything.”
I knew how love could make you stupid. How sex could make you stupid. It was pretty much in the definitions. “So you…went along with it? His plan?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I did. I didn’t know that he planned to hurt Philip. He never showed me a gun until… First he said we would just lay low, like some kind of backward Atlas Shrugged.” He laughed roughly. “As if we were running the world. Everyone would notice we were gone, and they’d miss us. And meanwhile we could hole up in some kind of twisted honeymoon, having sex and smoking pot and—”
He sighed with his eyes shut, defeat written in tired lines across his young face.
“It’s okay,” I said softly.
“How can you say that?” He looked affronted, and it charmed me to realize he was offended on behalf of me. “I went along with the stupid plan, knowing that you and my parents would worry about me. That was the idea, that you’d go to Philip for help—and then Marco would make you pay to get me back, money that would replace what he lost, what he should have had all along. It was fucked up.”
“It was fucked up,” I agreed softly, but I had seen too many fucked-up things in the world for this to shock me.
“And then the days kept passing, and I started waking up from this hazy drugged state—and realizing that this wasn’t okay. This wasn’t okay at all, and I needed to go home and set things right. Only, he wouldn’t let me leave.”
Like when Philip had locked me in his bedroom. Neither had a great deal of respect for other people’s personal freedoms. Though there was an important difference. Philip had kept me in that bedroom to protect me, to shield me from a dangerous meeting where I could have gotten hurt.
“He wasn’t right in the head,” I said softly, repeating Philip’s words.
“No,” Tyler said, a quiet grief underlying his words. “He wasn’t.”
I stood and opened the bathroom door, knowing enough time had passed. I crossed the small room and picked up the little plastic test. Sure enough, bars had appeared in the clear window. Not pregnant.
One sob shook my body, from my shoulders down to my weak knees. Then another. I sank to the floor, face buried in my hands—and just like years ago, my brother held me, his embrace less awkward this time, tight and comforting and knowing, because now he had felt grief too.
I cried for the things I had lost, an entire life of normalcy that I had dreamed of since I found out I was adopted. I cried for the things I had gained—a family of my own. And I cried for the man who had given it to me, a man who valued family above all else, a man who had betrayed his own blood in order to save me. A man who had gone, disappeared, who cared enough to kill for me but not enough to stay.