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  No. No. No! Kenny’s cries echoed in my mind.

  The earth tilted on its axis, and my stomach pitched again. I pulled away from her touch, sinking, waiting for the weight of my guilt and shame to finally, hopefully suffocate me. “I knew it wasn’t real. I knew it.” I laughed out a harsh sound. “I’m on this…this staircase to hell. Every lie I told, every single one, it just brought me another step down, another lie closer to hell. But you—” I waved a hand at her, disgust tinting my vision. “You were on your own staircase, telling your own lies.”

  I leaned over my knees, buried my face in my hands. Laughter, hysterical and raw, burst from my lips.

  “They say, ‘It takes one to know one,’ but I never knew! I asked you—I begged you to tell me your brother’s name, but you swore it wasn’t him. You kissed me.” The words were like a blade, cutting me, bleeding me. “You slept with me. You told me you loved me, but it was all a fucking lie.” I pressed my hands to my ears to silence the sound of that blade coming again. And again. And again.

  I jumped to my feet, ready to run.

  “No! No, Dan, that part wasn’t a lie. I swear I love you. I admit what Jeff said was true, but then it all changed, Dan. I changed.”

  “Oh, you changed, huh?” I sneered. “When did all this change happen? ’Cause you didn’t say anything on the first day of school. Or the day after that. Or the fucking day after that,” I shouted. “So what was the plan, Julie? You wanted revenge? When were you gonna take it?” I taunted.

  “No!” She pressed hands to her ears. “Not revenge. I swear I didn’t want to hurt you.” She sobbed. “I never wanted that.”

  That stunned me into silence.

  “I just wanted my dad to like me again. He’s been looking for you for years, and I thought…I thought I could give you to him. I could be, like, a hero instead of just the spare girl.”

  I got into a lot of trouble intentionally. For attention.

  Julie’s words, cued up like a favorite song, kicked my ass. All the crap she’d done to get attention—I was nothing more than the latest piece of it.

  Somehow, that seemed fitting.

  My face twisted, but she rushed on, “Since I was thirteen, I’ve had this picture of you in my mind. The big bad bully who teased Liam so badly he had to kill himself to escape. I hated that boy. And I hate my dad more.” She paused on a sob. “But it’s not who you are. You weren’t supposed to be so…so…good! Standing up for Brandon, kissing that baby’s boo-boos, always doing the right thing. I never expected to love you,” she finished and grabbed my shoulders.

  “Don’t.” I pushed out through clenched teeth. “Don’t you dare tell me you love me.” I shook her hands off me.

  Julie recoiled as if I’d slapped her, and my heart squeezed in my chest. My hand shot out to steady her, apologies hanging from my lips. When, when would I learn words could cut? Hadn’t I just felt their sting?

  “Dan, please. Listen to me.” She clasped her hands together like a prayer. “I’ve been doing my best to keep my dad away from you. Making excuses, blowing him off, picking fights, anything to stop him from showing up and seeing you. I know he’s mad, but he won’t really hurt you—”

  “Jesus, Julie! What the hell else do you think he’s gonna do?” I flung my arms up, striding back and forth on waves of rage. “Pat me on the back with a ‘Nice to see you paid your debt to society’ speech? He tried to strangle me right in the courtroom! He showed up at our house with a goddamn baseball bat.”

  I paced, fury surging in my veins, until I saw Kenny. He was still curled up, crying. I sank down to the bench beside him, scrubbing my hands over my face. “I just want to know when you were gonna spring the big reveal on me.” I twisted my lips into a sorry excuse for a smile.

  She jerked again.

  Cut it out, man. Kenny lifted his head to snarl, but I ignored him.

  “I was never going to tell you.”

  My jaw dropped. “How—”

  “I know! It was dumb. As soon as I knew the kind of person you really are, I swore I would never tell you. All I had to do was keep my dad away from you, and I could have pulled it off. I hardly ever see him.” She sobbed out loud, hiding her face in her hands. “But then he figured out something was up and just wouldn’t stay away.”

  A surge of bitterness speared through me, and I started a slow round of applause. “Congratulations. I thought I was an incredibly gifted actor, but you have me beat by light-years. Every time you called me Dan, I had to swallow back the puke from the lies while you’re telling lies just to get your daddy to look at you.” My voice was a shrill screech by the end of my tirade. “You know what’s seriously messed up? I have my grandmother’s engagement ring in a box in my room. My folks gave it to me on Christmas Eve. I was gonna give it to you someday. Guess the joke’s on me.”

  I said cut it out, dick! Kenny’s mental punch to my gut made me gasp.

  My rage evaporated as suddenly as it had formed, and I hung my head over my knees. “Why didn’t you just tell me the truth?”

  “The truth?” She twisted her mouth into the same mocking jeer I remembered from the first day of school. “Why bother? You don’t believe it even when I do tell it.”

  Sucker punch. I jerked up with a flinch. “What…what the hell does that mean?”

  Julie flung up her hands. “It means you believe what you want to believe. Poor Dan, he has all this guilt and thinks he’s so bad,” she mocked. “I fell in love with you, but that isn’t good enough.”

  I stared at her, wished I could believe her.

  Abruptly, Julie’s fury faded to disappointment. “Oh God.” She folded her arms around her middle. “What do I have to do to convince you? I know what you did. I’ve always known. And still, I hung out with you. I forgave you. That’s why I gave you that medal for Christmas. I wanted to be with you so much. I even told my father I didn’t want to see him again. Why can’t you believe it?”

  She’s right, you ass. Think about it. She’s done a lot for you. What have you done for her?

  My hand flitted to the chain around my neck. I loved her, I wanted to scream at Kenny. But his question burned in my head. What had I ever done to show it? She’d pull away from me, but I pushed her, demanded to know why. And all this time, she was trying to protect me from her father. I went back over it all, back to the first day when I squinted, concussed and bleeding, into denim blue eyes. I’d gotten into her face, dredged up a ton of old pain, forced her to confront the ugliest truth about herself, embarrassed her in front of the entire student body, and even though I didn’t know about her actions behind the scenes, she’d turned her back on her father for me. I pulled shaking hands through my hair, wishing I could rip it out by the roots as the realization, the certainty that I’d done nothing that deserved forgiveness or love or the truth about everything hit me like a steel boot to the head.

  “Because,” I murmured. “Because you can never forget. Every time you look at me, all you will ever see is the boy you hate, the boy who killed your brother. How can you really forgive me if you can’t ever forget?”

  She blew out a long, loud breath and collapsed beside me on the bench, stared up at the granite sculpture. “Are you kidding me? That’s what this is about? You really buy into that forgive-and-forget crap?”

  I laughed once because it was hopeless and I knew it, and if I didn’t laugh, I’d throw myself into the surf and let the tide take me.

  She made a sound of disgust. “You’re right. I can’t forget. I thought loving you in spite of that was enough.”

  She said that now, but what about a year from now? We stared at each other for a long moment, both afraid to say out loud what we knew to be true. It would always be there, like the scars on my chest. What I did tied us together only to keep us apart. An unbreakable bond. An unforgivable sin.

 
She sobbed, a hollow, sad sound. “I hope someday you’ll believe me.” With that, she stood and ran, and I let her go, listening to the scream inside my head as she ran, the low-slung sun turning her hair a flaming gold. She faded, moving farther away, stretching that bond until I was sure it would tear me in half.

  I let out a groan, a guttural sound scraping from the depths of the soul I’d blackened the day I clicked Send. With my hands fisted and my eyes focused on the only light my life had seen in five years, a sudden white-hot pain between my shoulders sent me to my knees.

  A pair of boots moved into my peripheral vision, and while I gasped on the ground, a hand grabbed my hair, forced my head back. What was left of my air whooshed out when I recognized the demented face haloed by the setting sun.

  Jack Murphy had finally found me.

  Not Like This

  “Kenneth Mele. I’ve been looking for you for years.”

  He stood over me in a cloud of body odor and boozy breath, the man whose son I teased to death five years ago but whose grief still boiled as violently as if it happened yesterday.

  Jack Murphy.

  Jesus, bro!

  He was a bear of a man wearing torn jeans and a windbreaker zipped to his neck. Untidy dark hair framed the bitter pain frozen in his eyes. Julie’s eyes.

  Head in the game. Come on! Fight.

  I shut my eyes. Julie forgot to mention she’d invited her dad to my beach. Suddenly, Brandon popped into my mind. I finally understood the desperation he must have been feeling to take that gun to school.

  Game over, Kenny.

  You can’t just stand there and let him beat you.

  Yes, I can. I will.

  Kenny’s eyes closed. He braced himself.

  So I waited. There was no point in running. Let’s just get it over with. One way or another.

  “You remember me?” His voice was like gravel.

  I nodded…or tried to with his solid grip on my hair.

  “You took my son. I won’t let you take my daughter too. I came here to save her before she makes the biggest mistake of her life.”

  I laughed, but the sound held no joy. “Yeah, well, I wouldn’t worry about that. She dropped the act.”

  His eyebrows shot up, and he relaxed his grip on my hair. “So she’s not going to college with you?”

  His words made no sense. “College?” I laughed once. “Right. Wasn’t your plan to break me? Well, congratulations. It worked.” I twisted out of his grip only to slide back to the bench. “She’s quite an actress. Willing to go as far as it takes to get the right emotion—up to and including sleeping with the enemy. You should be proud.”

  Blood colored his face. A muscle twitched in his jaw. I saw him pull back his fist, watched it come at me. I could have blocked it, but what would have been the point?

  The blow knocked me off the bench, and the pain was blinding. I landed on my hands and knees, dizzy, when he delivered a savage kick to my gut. I folded in half, gasping. I should have been screaming in agony, but there was no time. Murphy’s heavy boot collided with my face hard enough to flip me onto my back. I lay sprawled on the ground in front of him, Kenny screaming in my mind. My brain shut down. There was nothing, only the pain. Another kick—this time to my groin—and the air whooshed from my lungs.

  For one short, beautiful moment, I felt nothing at all. No guilt. No heartache. No worry. Nothing but the cold white numb spreading over me, consuming everything, and I knew in that moment, I would have to die. Nothing I’d done, nothing I would ever do, could make up for Liam.

  A life for a life.

  No! Kenny’s sobs leaked through the white and the pain. Get up. Fight back. I don’t want to die. Don’t let him kill us.

  It wasn’t up to him. It wasn’t up to either of us. I clawed my way to my hands and knees, sucking wind and spitting blood—and, Jesus, a tooth—to the ground and laughed. Not because I thought this was funny. I didn’t think that at all. But I figured someone had a hell of a sense of humor. Of all the towns, all the schools, all the girls in the world, it was not enough for me to meet the sister of my own victim. Falling in love with her wasn’t enough either. No, I have to watch her tear the beating heart out of my chest and hold it up to her father like a fucking trophy. This had to be some kind of cosmic joke, right? Was God really this sick and twisted? So, are you laughing yet, God? I am. Look at me laugh!

  When I could catch my breath, I blinked through my tears at Jack Murphy, who watched me with cold, dead eyes. I was rolling around the ground and knew he was waiting for me to climb to my feet just so he could knock me right back off them. It was real. It wasn’t just a nightmare. It was real, and it was happening. Jack Murphy had to kill me. I stopped laughing then. It was all part of God’s plan. It had to be. It has to be like this, Kenny.

  No! he screamed at me, and my skull vibrated. Not now. Not after everything that’s happened. Not like this! We were happy. For the first time in five years, you let us be happy. We had friends! Stuff to look forward to! We have to make him hear us. Make him see the truth. This isn’t only our fault! We don’t deserve this. Think about Mom. Dad. Pop. They worked so hard to save us.

  I considered Kenny’s words, already shaking my head to dismiss them. The motion sent another lash of agony through my chest. Every breath I took scorched my lungs.

  Rib. Kenny offered, and I nodded once, in too much pain to care.

  “Get up, you self-righteous son of a bitch.” Murphy dragged me up by my collar. “You piece of shit. She wasn’t acting. She’s in love with you and done nothing but tell me how cruel I am for doing what I have to do. I couldn’t count on her, couldn’t count on my own flesh and blood. She said she didn’t want to see me ever again. Because of you! She wouldn’t even tell me where you were. I had to follow her!” The tendons in his neck strained as he half-carried, half-dragged me along the path to the water.

  “Julie doesn’t understand,” he said. “Losing a son—” He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, and when he turned them on me, they were full of anguish. “Why did you do it?”

  Something rose in me, something bitter, black and years old, Kenny’s words riding its crest. We.

  Kenny had said we.

  Don’t let him kill us!

  I felt Kenny’s energy fading while Murphy ranted.

  “Why did you take my boy? Tell me why!”

  Us. Kenny’s words echoed in my ringing head, playing on a loop.

  We. Our. Us.

  “Enough!” I screamed and surged to my feet despite the pain. “I did not kill him. He killed himself. You want to be angry? Be angry at him. Be angry at yourself for not seeing that he needed help. Be angry at everyone else who knew and never said anything. He was twelve years old, for God’s sake. How did you not know your own kid was in that much agony?” My hands shook with the years of bottled-up rage. “I made fun of him, yes. I hurt his feelings, yes. But I. Did. Not. Kill. Him.”

  “Shut up, shut up, shut up.”

  Block right! Fight the pain, Kenny directed. My arm shot up to deflect the punch coming at my face. Open middle! I buried my left fist in his soft gut, shoved him back when he doubled over with a grunt.

  “Don’t you dare put this on me. It’s your fault. Yours! Why should you get to live and he doesn’t?” he raged with his hands on his knees.

  I laughed, a maniacal sound. “You think what I do is living? He haunts me. Every day for the past five years, I see your son’s face. It’s the first thing I see in the morning and the last thing I see at night.”

  “Good!” Wheezing, he shoved a hand into his pocket and pulled out a gun.

  I froze.

  Don’t run! Kenny warned.

  I couldn’t. I didn’t have the strength.

  “Walk.” He jammed the gun against the rib he’d broken, a
nd the pain clawed through the feeble surge of adrenalin I’d managed to stir up. My eyes crossed, and my knees buckled.

  He grabbed my arm and hustled me down the path. “This is between you and me. I’m not out to hurt anybody else.”

  Gee, that’s comforting.

  We walked down to the sand, my chest burning with every step. My vision blurred. My head and face screamed. The early crowd was gone. Only a few fishermen remained. If these were going to be my last minutes on Earth, I was glad they were on a beach. He marched me behind a dune and stopped.

  “On your knees.”

  Kenny, I’m out of ideas.

  Don’t give up. Just don’t give up. Please.

  I have nothing left, Kenny. I can barely breathe.

  No! We have to fight!

  There it was again. We.

  “I said on your knees!”

  He kicked at my knee, and I dropped, gasping against the fire in my chest.

  “I waited so long for this. But Julie…she thinks I’m bitter and broken. She doesn’t understand. I’m gonna send you to hell, where you belong. For Liam. I’m doing this for him.”

  I braced for the pain, but I had a few things to say first. “I’m sorry. I know you don’t believe it, but I never meant for your son to die.” One more crush of misery when I thought of Julie. “For years, I hated me too. Until I met Julie. I’m in love with her in spite of, well, everything. Please. Please don’t do this to her. Let me go.”

  I stared down the black barrel of the gun Murphy pointed at my face, my eyes calm and steady. Everybody always said that your life flashes before your eyes in situations like these, but mine didn’t. There was only the deluge of regrets, an endless parade of them. Teasing Liam to death. Hurting Julie. Forcing my parents into a life of running. Getting branded a sex offender, carved up like a museum sculpture, and thrown in jail.

  The regrets ebbed. All that was left was my relentless guilt, and if there was a merciful God, that was about to end. I watched Murphy’s fingers with dread or maybe anticipation, I wasn’t sure. His thumb released the safety. His index finger slowly moved for the trigger.