Article 5 (Article 5 #1)(82)

“She’s dead,” I realized.

He nodded. “Yes.”

“You lied to me. You let me believe she was alive. In some safe house!” I screamed suddenly. Now there was anger. Hot and vicious and poisonous within me.

“I know.”

“Were you ever going to tell me?”

“I would have, once you were away from all this. Maybe not all of it. I didn’t want you to know all of it. No one should have to hear all that.”

“So you can take it but I can’t? She’s my mother, Chase!”

“I didn’t mean you can’t handle it. I just mean … I don’t know. I didn’t want to hurt you.”

“You’d rather me believe a lie than be hurt? Who the hell gave you that authority?”

“I don’t know.” He was honest. He didn’t know what he was doing. His hands lay open on his knees before him, begging for some shred of direction to which he could cling.

I was rolling now. A snowball plunging down a hill. Knowing that at the bottom there was a brick wall that would smash me. That would break me into a million pieces.

“You knew all this from the very beginning. From the day you got me at school. You knew she was dead. You’d seen her dead. And you kept that from me.”

“Yes.”

Faster, I rolled on.

“How could you do that?”

He shook his head.

Twisting inside of me. Nothing is real.

“You said … you said all those things … and … I believed you.”

“Wait. Please. That was the truth,” he was pleading now.

I shook my head. There was no truth.

“Ember, I love you.”

His words hacked a bright new pain into me. I stared at him for a full second, horrified, recognizing that this was the first time he’d said these words. Thinking maybe the opposite was true. That Chase might actually hate me. That was why he lied about everything. That was why he kept hurting me. How could someone be so cruel?

His eyes were filled with what I’d once thought was honesty.

“I shouldn’t have said that now. It’s too much. I’m putting too much on you. But … Christ. I mean it, I—”

“No! I trusted you, and I thought it was right and it wasn’t right. It was a lie.” I felt ill then, disgusted by my own self. I wanted to crawl out of my skin, to leave it in this dirty room with its ugly truths.

“It wasn’t like that. You know. Please know.”

His reached out to touch my hand.

“No!” I bawled. “Don’t touch me. Don’t you dare touch me. Not ever again.”

I struck the wall. My world was crashing down. Everything I believed was scattered. False.

I didn’t think. I couldn’t. I rocked forward and hit him as hard as I could. My hand seized with pain from where it had connected to his jaw. I hit him again. Again. He didn’t try to stop me. He placed his hand beneath my elbow, giving me the strength to hit him harder.

When I had no punches left, I folded over my reeling stomach. I was no better than Roy, hitting my mother. I wanted violence to resolve my anguish. To show Chase how wrong he was. The parallel made my reality infinitely more devastating.

“It’s okay. Hit me. I deserve it.”

As though that would make it better. As though that would fix anything.

“No more,” I moaned.

He lifted his hands in surrender. “Ember, I’ll do whatever you want. Just please let me get you somewhere safe. That was the whole point in this. I knew that once you found out, you’d want to get as far away from me as possible, and if you believed your mom was in South Carolina, you’d let me take you there. I told you in the beginning, if you want me gone after that, I’m gone.”

“I’m not going anywhere with you.”

“Please. Just let me get you somewhere safe.”

All the slashes of pain inside. All the losses. My mother. Chase. Beth. Rebecca. Trust. Love. I had nothing left but the skeleton of integrity.

“No.”

“If you won’t listen to me, do it for her. Lori wanted you away from all this.”

“Don’t!” I cried out. I could not bear to hear her name.

He hung his head. “I’ve messed everything up. From the beginning. I’ve done nothing right by you. By your mother. She loved you so much, Ember.”

“She’s dead because of you!”

And what was worse was that she was dead because of me, too. Because if I’d never told Chase to leave, he wouldn’t have gone into the military. They never would have targeted him. They never would have used us to break him. Through some twist of fate, I had killed my own mother. The shame was so thick I could not speak it.

He rocked back onto his heels and then stood. I knew I had wounded him. I had done so deliberately. I wanted to injure him. To make him hurt as deeply as I did. But how could he?

“Yes,” he said simply. “She’s dead because of me.”

“Get out. Get away from me.”

Minutes passed. But he did leave. I heard the door close softly behind him.

*



I SOBBED for hours huddled in a clenched ball. I cried until the tears dried up. And when they did, my body cried without them.