“You took money from them in exchange for breaking up with me?” My gaze bolted to hers. I was nearing my personal brink.

The look of horror on her face told me everything I needed to know.

“Emmett, please. It’s not like that.” She grabbed my hand, grasping, pulling, holding. The punches kept on coming. Someone threw a left hook right into my gut. My lungs struggled to function.

I wrenched myself away like her touch burned—not the kind that set me aflame with a pleasure so intense I could barely stand, but the kind that threatened to leave me a charred pile of ash.

Tears filled her eyes, tears of guilt…the same guilt I’d seen in her gaze before and had tried to reason away. I’d been blind to it this whole time, not wanting to see the reality of the situation. I’d wanted to have her back so badly I’d pushed everything else aside.

“What is it like, Avery?” The acrid bitterness seeped out of my words.

“You don’t understand. I needed it.” Her lips snapped shut.

“Tell me the truth.” I was ready to dismantle this place brick by brick.

“I…my dad…” Her words died again, like she was incapable of just telling me the truth—the whole truth.

“You tell me I don’t know who you are, who you really are, but how can I if you won’t tell me? So many times you’ve told me there was nothing else to tell me. Nothing important that couldn’t wait, but there was always more.” The bottled-up rage within me threatened to explode. “You want me to believe this is real, want me to believe you ever loved me, but you keep fucking lying.”

“I’ve always loved you. I never lied about my feelings for you—never.” There was a fiery conviction in her voice.

I wanted to clamp my hands over my head and bury it in the sand, but that was what had gotten me into this mess in the first place.

“Even when I pushed you away, every second we’ve been apart, I’ve thought about you.” Her voice was winded and choppy like she was having trouble catching her breath.

Welcome to the club.

“Or about what you could get from me.” She was just another opportunist. I squeezed my eyes shut. Never her—I’d never wanted to think that about her.

“Never! Never, Em.” Her voice cracked as tears crested down her cheeks.

I tried to steel myself against them. I’d promised myself she wouldn’t cry tears of sadness again, but that was before the knife had gone straight to my heart.

“My dad is an addict, a junkie. I needed the money to get him into rehab, to get him clean so he didn’t OD again and he could keep his job, keep Alyson in school.”

I almost laughed from surprise. “What?” I knew her dad wasn’t the most reliable, but she’d never even mentioned that he drank, let alone used drugs.

She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “He was spiraling, not showing up at home, forgetting to get Alyson when I couldn’t… Fischer’s locker—that’s what he stole: drugs. I couldn’t let him keep going and get hurt—” Squeezing her eyes shut, she wrapped her arms around her waist. “Or end up dead. That was what happened with me and Fischer. He wanted me to get down on my knees and beg him not to call the cops.”

“What happened with him? Tell me everything.”

“Emmett, maybe it would be best, if—” Harold came out of fucking nowhere, stepping beside my parents.

“What did you do?” I shouted, cutting off his attempt to interrupt. Their machinations had been fucking up my life since I’d taken my first breath. I clenched my fists at my sides, a blanket of red slowly descending on the scene. I couldn’t trust anyone. Everyone was using me, manipulating me, hiding things from me for their own ends.

“Emmett—” My mom tried to put on her tv sitcom mother voice.

“Tell me now!” I jabbed my finger toward the ground.

“That’s not the way we raised you to speak to us.” My dad’s words came out like he was talking to a toddler having a tantrum.

“You’re right, you didn’t fucking raise me at all,” I ground out. This assault was hitting me from all sides. “Get out!” I roared so loudly my throat screamed for relief.

They both backed away and the door closed behind them. Silence punctuated by the sharp erratic breathing behind me was all there was. I whipped around to face Avery.

She pleaded with me with her red-ringed eyes.

“What happened with Fischer? I want all of it. Tell me all of it.”

Bending at the waist, she wrapped her arms around her tighter and sucked in some air. It got caught in her throat. “It was drugs. That was what happened with my dad and Fischer’s locker. He…my dad found Fischer’s stash and stole it. I went to Fischer to ask him not to tell anyone. He could have made up anything, saying my dad stole money or something so he wouldn’t get in trouble and my dad would get thrown in jail.” She squeezed her eyes shut. “I went to confront him at the party.” Her breathing was erratic. Bottom lip wobbling, she rocked back and forth like she was on the edge of a breakdown—and, well, so was I.

So many lies. So many things hidden from me. From my parents, I’d expected nothing less, but from her? After everything we’d said to each other, the promises and plans we’d made… That dull ache was raw and ragged now.

“What happened?”

“He wanted me to beg, all right?” Her eyes shot open, the burning anger lighting the room on fire. “He told me if I wanted to make sure he didn’t make up some shit about valuables being stolen out of his locker, I had to get down on my knees and beg him.”

My stomach turned. Swallowing past the boulder in my throat, I pushed on. “So you did.”

“Yes, I got down on my knees like he fucking asked, and he wanted me to crawl closer, so I did. He grabbed my hair…that’s when you walked in. What choice did I have? What was I supposed to do?”

“Tell me!” I roared. “You should have told me what the hell was going on so I could help, so I could fix it.”

“How were you going to fix it? You didn’t even understand why I was so protective of Alyson. ‘You’re not her mom’ was what you always said to me. How was I supposed to tell you everything else going on? That I’ve been keeping my family afloat since I was thirteen? That my dad was never the same after the accident and I’ve been the one trying to hold it together? That I was scared every day until she was eighteen that my dad would fall off the deep end and someone would take Alyson away? I got down on my fucking knees and begged Fischer to protect my family.” Sadness warred with anger in her eyes.

That yawning cavern sucked me in. I was clinging to the edge by my fingertips. “I thought I was part of your family.”

Her eyes got wide. “You were—you are.”

“How can I be when you don’t trust me with things like this? When you’re taking on things that affect both our lives and shutting me out?”

“I didn’t want to be that girl with you, okay? I didn’t want to be Avery, the daughter of a junkie and surrogate mother to her little sister. I liked who I was with you. That’s the real me as much as any other part of me, but it was an Avery without everything else heaped on top of her.” She stepped forward, raising her hands to my face.

I grabbed her wrists, catching them in midair. “But that wasn’t who you really were. It was a lie, a way to trick me into thinking you were someone you weren’t. Taking money from my parents and hiding it from me…” I dropped her hands.

“No! This is why I didn’t want to tell you. There were already so many whispers, so many people who said you’d get over your wrong-side-of-the-tracks fling.” Her gaze shot over my shoulder toward the closed door.

“And you thought I cared what other people thought? You thought I cared what they thought?” The anger and fury of my words was directed right at my parents even though they were gone.

“I’m sorry. I… You can’t know how sorry I am, but I did it to protect you.”

“You did it to protect yourself. How do I know you’re even the woman I fell in love with?”

“Of course I am. It’s still me.”

“Which part of you? All of you? Or just the parts you wanted me to see? I’ve never hidden anything from you.” Tears burned in my eyes. “Never. But at every turn I find out another secret, so many lies after you telling me there’s nothing else for me to know.”

“That’s it. You know everything now.”

“How can I know that? How do I know you aren’t hiding something else from me?” A sadness I hadn’t let touch me in a while filled my chest.

“I’m not. I swear it. This was the only thing left, the only thing I kept from you.”

“I can’t trust you.” Those words were raw and angry in my throat. “You need to leave.”

“Don’t do this, Emmett.” She shook her head in disbelief. “Please.”

I closed my eyes. Had I imagined the Avery I was with? Had I let myself be sucked in by the happiness? How could I not have known something so important? Had I been blind, or was she just that good at hiding things? Maybe it was both. Maybe she’d also been pretending to love me and I’d been tricking myself into thinking I could matter that much to someone.

“Leave.” I pointed an angry finger toward the front door as I blinked back my tears and shoved them down deep inside. Betrayal coated in a bitter candy shell topped with a serving of parental neglect was on the menu for me today. I couldn’t go after her.

She rushed past me and into the bedroom. It was the scene that had replayed itself too many times since I’d left her, or maybe it was she who’d left me by keeping those secrets. I didn’t want only some of Avery; I wanted all of her, but I couldn’t trust her.

Grabbing some vodka from the bar, I unscrewed the lid and drank straight from the bottle. The burn did nothing to smooth out the ragged edges of my torn heart. My parents had pushed her away, offered her the money, but she was the one who’d taken their deal and left me behind. I’d have given her whatever she wanted, whatever she needed, without hesitation.

With bloodshot eyes, she came out into the living room in the jeans and t-shirt I knew so well, dragging her suitcase behind her—the same one I’d been trying to get her to fully unpack since she’d gotten there.

The walls were closing in, her shoulders rounded as she walked to the door. I fisted my hands at my sides and rooted my feet to the floor. I couldn’t go after her. I wanted to go, wanted to forgive it all and forget the past and start over as many times as we needed to get this right, but I couldn’t. I needed to trust her. If I couldn’t, she was like every other woman who’d come into my life to use me.

But that was wrong. The second those words formed in my mind, I knew they were wrong.

“I know—” Her voice caught. “I know you have no reason to believe me, but I never meant to hurt you with any of it. I never meant to hurt you, Em. I’m sorry I couldn’t give you everything you deserved.”

And then she was gone, again, taking my heart right along with her. I wanted to hate her again. At least the anger was something to fill the emptiness that threatened to drag me down into the depths of despair.