“WHAT ARE YOU talking about?” Surely she had misheard.
“Mariel died the very same week that you were . . . unaccounted for,” Watt said haltingly. “When we got back from Dubai, when you bought all those drugs.”
“You think I faked an overdose so I could kill Mariel? You think I’ve been lying about it all this time?” she cried out, sitting up angrily.
“No, no,” Watt scrambled to say. “I’m not suggesting that you planned to kill her. But maybe you were so messed up that you didn’t even realize what you were doing. You might have run into her outside the Tower and remembered what she’d tried to do to you, and you were so afraid that you pushed her into the water. Or maybe she attacked you,” he added, his eyes lighting up; he seemed to prefer that idea. “She could have come at you, trying to finish what she started, and you killed her in self-defense! You just don’t remember because you blacked it out.”
No, Leda thought wildly. It couldn’t be.
Every one of her nerves was strumming at its highest, sharpest pitch. She put her hands on her knees, feeling dizzy. A horrible chthonic monster had stirred in the depths of her mind, a terrible, faceless fear—what if Watt was right?—but she wouldn’t look at it right now; she couldn’t or she would start screaming. She would face it later, when she couldn’t see Watt’s eyes.
“Leda, it’s okay. Whatever happened, it’ll be okay.” Watt reached a tentative hand toward her, but Leda whirled on him. She was never fiercer or more cruel than when she felt cornered.
“How dare you?” she breathed. “You, of all people.”
“Leda, I’m trying to help!”
“You told me earlier today that you see a goodness inside me that the rest of the world is too careless to see,” she reminded him, her voice breaking. “And yet you think I’m capable of killing someone.”
“I just wanted to ask if it was possible,” Watt said helplessly. Leda threw up her hands.
“Why are you even asking me? I clearly have no idea; according to you, I’ve forgotten the whole thing. Ask the computer you keep in your brain. That’s how you solve all your problems anyway!”
Watt flinched at that, but Leda hardly noticed; she was trembling.
“Don’t worry. I’m leaving,” she announced in a chilly, remote voice that didn’t belong to her at all.
A small, foolish part of her hoped that Watt might run after her. But he just let her storm away in silence.
Somehow Leda made it home and into her own bed. She felt cold all over, the way she had felt in Dubai when Mariel left her to drown, as if fingers of ice were creeping up her spine. Her breaths came shallow and ragged.
Everything swirled through her mind at once, and she closed her eyes, trying to make sense of it.
Could she have really killed Mariel and blacked it out?
Leda cast her mind back to that night. She’d been so devastated after Dubai, all she had wanted was to forget that she had killed her half sister. To wipe that knowledge brutally from her mind and start fresh.
What a reckless, stupid thing to have done, Leda thought. Forgetting never fixed anything. She remembered something Eris used to say when she drank until she blacked out. If you don’t remember it, it doesn’t count.
But this wasn’t a drinking game or a sloppy dance-floor makeout, something to wince and laugh about the next day. If this had really happened, it was murder.
Was she capable of that—of killing a girl in cold blood? Even a girl who hated her and left her for dead?
Whatever she’d done that day, Leda only remembered it in flashes. She remembered being in class, thoughts of Eris chasing one another desperately around her mind . . . escaping to the park to meet her dealer, Ross . . . the hollow look of her eyes in a mirror somewhere, as she fumbled in her bag for another pill . . . lights, pulsing and sharp, as if at a club . . . Everything else was a sticky, dark blur.
Every instinct in Leda screamed at her not to push further. She was afraid of the truths she might find buried there. Still, she tried to dredge through her mind for the missing memory.
She imagined seeing Mariel outside near the river. Screaming at Mariel, pushing her into the water. Leda pinched her fingernails into the soft flesh of her leg until it brought tears to her eyes, willing herself to remember, but her mind remained stubbornly blank.
She so desperately wanted it to be impossible. But wanting to believe things wasn’t enough to make them true.
Leda wished she could cry. It seemed almost worse this way, as if her grief lay in some foreign land, far past tears. A bottomless grief, opening like a dark chasm within her. She kept blinking, not sure if her eyes had dried out.
She collapsed back onto her coverlet and just lay there, staring numbly into the darkness, for what might have been an hour or might have been a minute, the way that time warps in strange ways when you’re in pain. The house felt utterly still, and the stillness settled on Leda like a fine, cold mist. It chilled her to the bone. She felt miles away from any other warm, living thing; even though her parents were probably right here in the apartment, a few dozen meters away.
What stung the most was the fact that the accusation had come from Watt. Just when Leda had changed her mind, had decided to take a chance on him again, he’d proven that all her fears were right.
He knew what she was capable of and didn’t hesitate to assume the worst of her. And really, could she blame him?
There was a gentle knocking at her door. “Leda, sweetie. Are you up?” her mom called out from the hallway. It seemed to Leda that her mom’s voice emanated from another world, a world where Leda wasn’t a hideous murderer.
If only her mom could take her to that world, so she could escape the horror she was currently living.
“Where were you?” Ilara asked.
“I was out. I think I’m getting sick,” Leda replied, deliberately vague. Her mom started to come inside, but Leda raised her voice, sharpening it like a weapon. “Please, just go.”
To her relief, Ilara didn’t ask any more questions, and retreated.
It was for the best, Leda told herself. Confronting the monster within herself was a task that could only be done alone.