CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
THE UNWELCOME
Millie crept into my room half an hour later. Her eyes flicked to the broken phone, narrowing in understanding as she stepped over it. ‘So … that didn’t go well, then,’ she surmised.
‘You have no idea.’
She huffed a sigh and cocked her head, studying my pathetic, crumpled form. Eventually she said, ‘I think you should try and get out of bed.’
This was not the first time she had suggested this. It wasn’t even the tenth time.
I stared at the white flecks in my fingernails. ‘What’s the point?’
She sat down at the end of my bed. ‘Living, Soph. Living is the point.’
‘I am living,’ I mumbled.
‘No. You’re existing.’
I flicked my gaze up, but I couldn’t manage the half-smile I was going for. ‘What’s the difference?’
‘You know the difference,’ she said softly. She seemed so small and tired at the end of my bed. Her hoodie sleeves were pulled over her hands and her face was drawn. Guilt swelled inside me.
‘You don’t have to spend all your time here with me, Mil.’ I gestured around me – at my messy room, my messy life. ‘I know it’s depressing. I know I’m not exactly performing in the friend department. I haven’t been for a while.’
‘Soph,’ she chastised. ‘You know I’m not going anywhere. What kind of friend would I be then?’
‘The kind I’m being?’ I shrugged. ‘You shouldn’t have to be in the darkness with me.’
‘I think the whole point of being a good friend is being in the darkness. I’ll be your light, until you can be it yourself again. How about that?’
I mustered a smile, and for a moment it felt like my heart was swelling just a little. ‘You’re very good at this,’ I told her.
‘Well.’ She flashed me a grin. ‘I do like to overachieve at all the important things.’
I leant back against my pillow and let the silence fall around us. Millie shifted, examining me in the falling light, and I knew it was coming even before she said it – the inevitable. ‘So,’ she began, tracing circles on the duvet. ‘School starts back next week.’
She might as well have dropped a fresh heap of trash on my face. I grimaced. ‘I’d rather gouge my eyes out and eat them.’
‘It’s our senior year. It’ll be fun.’ There was little, if any, conviction in her reply.
I imagined the dull thud of my feet in the hallways, the thunderous clanging of lockers between classes, the mindless nattering filling the air, the soul-destroying existence of my life inside those walls. If I was a source of interest before, I’d be the main attraction now. ‘I’m not ready.’
Millie gripped my leg through the duvet. ‘You have to make yourself ready, Soph. You have to grit your teeth and do it, you know? It’s the last year. And then everything changes. You can do it. We both can.’
I didn’t answer her. The conversation had tired me out, and I didn’t feel like wading into the matter of school just then. After a while Millie accepted defeat and rolled off the end of my bed. I burrowed further in, feeling vaguely embarrassed by my petulance. She got up and crossed over to the doorway. I could feel her hovering, her fingers scratching lightly on the wood.
‘What is it?’ I asked.
She measured her words, starting out slowly like she was still unsure of whether to say anything at all. ‘I know you told me you don’t want to talk about that night yet. And I’ve tried to respect that. But I don’t see how I can keep this from you any longer …’
I sat up. ‘Keep what from me?’
‘The Falcone boys are downstairs. They’ve been here for a while, actually, but I knew you didn’t want any reminders of … of what happened …’ She trailed off, examining her shoes. ‘I wasn’t going to tell you, but I think you should know. They won’t go away. They don’t want to leave you unprotected … in case …’
In case he comes back for me.
Millie had thought me crazy for not telling the police about Jack and Donata. I had considered it, in my darkest moments, but I wanted two things that snitching couldn’t assure me: a fate worse than prison for them, and my own survival.
Millie looked uneasy. ‘Nic says he won’t leave until he sees you. Mrs Bailey has been swatting him with tea towels all week.’
All week.
I frowned at my duvet, zeroing in on the swirls. The pain had regressed to a dull thud in the base of my chest again. I hadn’t thought about Nic much since the fire, but there were things that needed to be said, and maybe it was time to deal with that. ‘Can you tell him to come up?’
Millie bounded into the hallway and down the stairs. ‘Nic?’ she called, and for the first time I registered the low timbre of a new voice and realized it had probably been there all along.
When Nic appeared in my doorway he was paler than I’d ever seen him. His hair was messy and his jawline was marked with the dark shadow of week-old stubble, making him seem much older. He had a bandage running the entire length of his arm and another wrapped around his hand.
He didn’t move to come inside, though I could tell by the quiet shuffling that he wanted to. What must I have seemed like to him? A wild animal waiting to pounce, or something wounded and caged?
He fiddled with the cross around his neck, pulling it up and down the chain so that it made a faint grinding noise in the silence.
‘How are you?’ The words rasped in his throat. The smoke had gotten him bad.
I spread my arms wide by way of explanation: I looked like I had been dragged through a field of manure backwards and then dressed in a dumpster by a blind person.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said softly. ‘I’m sorry she’s gone.’
Don’t think about her. I scrunched my thoughts down and looked at Nic instead. It was impossible not to think about the last time I had seen him. I remembered the dumpster-groove in the kitchen’s metal door, the way Nic’s eyes had flashed as he faced off with my uncle. Don’t think about Jack.
I had dragged Nic’s lifeless body away from the fire that destroyed my life … Don’t think about the fire. I had gone to help him instead of making sure my mother was safe. I should have checked, but I didn’t. I should have helped her first, but I didn’t. Don’t think about her. He had pulled me away from her white sneakers when I was almost close enough to touch them.
‘Sophie?’ Nic’s body was dipping across the threshold, his fingers digging into the doorframe.
‘What?’
He blinked, surprised by my bluntness. ‘I’m worried about you.’
Now that he was standing across from me, I realized I didn’t want to see him. All our memories were bad ones – I couldn’t remember the good ones, couldn’t pretend his kisses would make all the darkness go away. Everything was too clear now.
‘You don’t have to be a Marino any more,’ he said quietly. ‘Not if you don’t want to be.’
‘I was never a Marino,’ I shot back. ‘You know that.’
He looked away, sheepish. He had thought I lied to him all along – I could see it in his expression.
‘And I sure as hell am not a Marino now,’ I added, hearing the venom in my words.
‘Come back with me,’ he said. ‘We’ll avenge your mother together. We’ll kill them for everything they’ve taken from us. You’ll have your revenge, I promise.’
What a way to comfort someone in the depths of grief – to promise death and destruction – and yet I felt charged by it. This was Nic – there were things he could never give me, empathy he could never really feel, but this, this was his world and of all the promises he had ever made and unmade, I knew he would keep this one. And that brought its own set of complications, because as much as he would do this for me, deep down it would always truly be for him.
‘Gino,’ I remembered. ‘They shot Gino.’
Nic’s expression darkened. ‘He’s in hospital. He’s hanging in there.’
‘Oh.’ I nodded, the barest trace of relief rising inside me. A small mercy. ‘Good.’
‘They’ll pay for that too,’ he said, his voice hard.
I looked at him – at every part of him, really, wholly – for the first time. I looked past the cheekbones, the searing eyes and the gentle curve of his lips. I had seen his body come alive, his fingers constricting around throats, his hand wielding a knife, his actions charged with murderous intent.
His T-shirt was creased slightly above his waistline. Even now, in times of mourning, he carried a loaded gun. He was an assassin – he had killed before and he would kill again and he wouldn’t lose any sleep over it. Nic was raw, heart-thudding passion personified, and he couldn’t measure it out for certain parts of his life and deny the others. He cared about me, sure, but he cared about other things, too. And they were darker, violent things that made up who he really was at his core. He had dumped Sara Marino in the lake. He had carved words of warning into her skin. And here he was, glittering in the duskiness – an angel sprung from hell.
Yes, I would say something to him; I would say the only thing pushing against my brain. I would say the thing that needed to be said.
The words came out clear and loud. ‘You hesitated.’
‘What?’
‘You didn’t drop your gun.’
‘What are you talking about?’
Carefully, I extracted the memory from That Night. ‘In the diner, when you and Luca came in through the back door, you both raised your guns. I looked inside the barrel of yours as you aimed it with full confidence at my head.’
Comprehension moved through Nic’s features, relaxing them. ‘But I wouldn’t have shot you.’
‘My head was in the way.’
‘My aim is very good.’
‘That’s the wrong answer.’
‘What’s the right answer?’
‘The fact that you don’t know says it all.’
‘I’m a good shot,’ he protested.
I glared at him. ‘I’d like to be alone now.’
‘What?’
‘You’ve seen me. I’m clearly alive. I am not communicating with any “fucking Marinos” as you call them. I am putting food in my mouth and consuming water regularly. You can go home now.’
‘But I want to help you, Sophie. This isn’t good—’
‘Nic.’ I sighed. ‘There’s nothing you can do for me.’
‘I love you,’ he said, pleadingly.
The words hit me right in the chest. He had never said that to me before, and now here it was, laid bare, in the lowest moment of my life. There was nothing but truth between us – the cold, hard truth, and those three little words that suddenly felt so huge. I had wanted to hear that for as long as I could remember. I had wanted someone to look at me the way he was looking at me just then. But now that I had it … it felt hollow. It felt wrong. And I knew, deep in my gut, that I wasn’t in love with him. I never had been. I’d been infatuated with the idea of love, and at a time when I had so little of it in my life, he had waltzed right through my defences and become that idea. I didn’t know what or who he really was beneath that.
‘You don’t know me,’ I said quietly. ‘Not really, not properly. Our whole time together has been about trying to make it work against all these crazy odds. It’s been about obstacles, not about each other.’
‘I know what I feel,’ he said resolutely.
A little broken part of me wanted to laugh. ‘You couldn’t even look at me when you heard I was a Marino.’
‘I was caught off guard,’ he protested.
‘When you love someone, you don’t lie to them. You don’t point a gun at their head. And you don’t turn your back on them when they’re at their most vulnerable.’ I swallowed hard. ‘That’s not love.’
He shook his head.
‘I think you love the idea of me,’ I whispered. Saying the words out loud hurt, but there was a tinge of relief in it too, as if the twisted fairy tale I’d been trying to make work was over, and I was OK. I had stopped trying to change him, trying to change myself to fit with him. ‘But we’re not right for each other, are we? We end up lying to each other, hurting each other.’
Nic ground his knuckles against the doorframe. ‘I told you. I would never hurt you.’
‘There’s more than one way to hurt someone.’
‘Yeah.’ His face twisted, from confusion to something else that I couldn’t place. ‘There is.’
I scrubbed my hands across my face, feeling exhausted all of a sudden.
‘We can talk about this again,’ he said quietly. ‘When you’re feeling better.’
I didn’t want to look at him any more. How could I, knowing I had gone to him when I should have gone to my mother? How could I lean on him with the image of his pointed gun burnt into my mind? He would always put his duties before everything else. He was a soldier first and a person second.
When I didn’t reply, he sucked in a breath and said, ‘We’ve heard your uncle and Donata are in New York meeting suppliers. I don’t know what their plans are, but when you’re feeling up to it, I think we should talk about your safety.’
‘He won’t come back here,’ I said. ‘Not after what he did. There’s too much heat on him.’
‘I wouldn’t be so sure.’
I slammed back against my pillow, fear and rage competing inside me. ‘I need to be alone right now, Nic.’
‘I’ll come back when you’re feeling better.’ He hovered in the doorway for a moment longer. ‘And Sophie? Thank you for saving my life.’
In place of hers, I thought, as bitterness twisted inside me. What was I supposed to say to that? You’re welcome? It didn’t matter. He had disappeared into the hallway. Something sour curled in my stomach. Skirting around that night had opened the gates, and the images were slithering into my mind like snakes, and I had to shut them out and block my ears to keep them away. Not yet. Not now.
I waited until I heard the soft thud of Nic’s feet reach the bottom of the stairs, then I buried my head between my knees and rocked back and forth in my bed, trying to calm my thoughts. Think of something else. Think of anything else. It was so hard; every part of me was bound up in my mother, in the diner, in my uncle. I dug my nails into my palms and concentrated on the little half-moons of pain. The minutes ticked by, slowly, and the cloud inside me got heavier. The sun had disappeared. It was getting dark and there was a quiet touch of relief in it.