Harder (Caroline & West #2)(81)

And then, “Don’t!”

I peel back the covers and tuck Caroline in.

I walk to my sister’s room and stand in the open doorway. “Frankie. Frankie. Franks, it’s okay.”

After half a minute, she stops thrashing. Then I can hear her sniffling and rummaging around for the box of tissues we keep on the floor by her bed.

I grab her a tissue and sit by her waist. Hand it over. Rub my hand up and down her back.

“You’re okay,” I tell her. “You’re safe. I’m here.”

She quiets.

I run my fingers through her hair.

“Tell me what happened,” I say. It’s the first time I’ve asked.

Maybe I didn’t really want to know.

Maybe I was afraid of what I’d hear.

Frankie draws a deep breath. “I was at a sleepover.”

“At whose house?”

“Keisha’s.”

“Where’s Keisha live?”

“Bandon.”

“How’d you get home?”

She’s quiet.

“Don’t lie to me.”

She’s so quiet.

I miss my chattering girl who never shut up. My Frankie from before, who ran to me when I came in a door, who hassled me for piggyback rides and never got sick of sucking up as much of my time and attention as I could spare.

I left that girl to come here, and I never got her back.

What I’ve got now is this new Frankie, who sasses me, hassles me, ignores me, but never tells me what’s in her heart.

I want my sister back, and the only way I can think to get to her is to wade through all this mess between us. This story she doesn’t want to tell, these changes in her life she’s afraid to talk to me about, the reality she doesn’t want to face: that we’re not ever going back to Silt.

We’re refugees.

“Tell me what really happened.”

“I was asleep,” she says.

Just like that.

“Dad was gone, he’d been gone a couple days, and I guess Bo knew that because he never came around, but he came around that night. It woke me up when Mom answered the door. I heard them talking. She let him in.”

Frankie sits up suddenly. She crisscrosses her legs. Her knee overlaps my thigh.

“They weren’t doing anything,” she says. “They were just talking. But Dad came home, and he was on something, I think.”

“On what?”

“I don’t know. He was almost always on something.”

“Fuck.” The word comes out of me, not a curse but a prayer. Months too late to do any good. Don’t let him hurt her. Don’t let anything hurt her.

“He was talking too fast, super angry, and they were all yelling. I think Dad hit Mom, because I heard her kind of yelp, and then Bo said something and they were fighting. I hid under the covers. They were crashing around until … until it was too quiet. And Mom said, ‘Wyatt, don’t.’ ”

The hair on the back of my neck stands up at the way she delivers those words, straight out of her nightmare.

“That’s when I went out there.”

I’m clutching my knees. I want to keep her from seeing whatever she’s about to see, and even though I know distantly that it’s happened already, it doesn’t seem to matter.

Don’t go out there, Franks. You’re gonna get hurt.

“Bo was on the floor, wiping blood off his mouth. Dad had—”

She shudders and leans into me hard. I put my arm around her. When she speaks again, her voice is high, forced. “Dad had a gun. He was pointing it at Mom, right at her head.”

I pull her onto my lap. She twines her arms around my neck and drops her head on my shoulder, so much like the baby she used to be that I can remember viscerally the heavy, damp weight of her. Holding her, jiggling her until she was drowsy, putting her down in the middle of mom’s bed for a nap, and then peeling carefully away, chilled from the loss of her body heat. Her lips slack and open to any of a thousand kinds of harm.

“Have you told anyone this?” I ask.

She nods. “Aunt Stephanie. And Caroline. But I didn’t tell them all of it.”

I hold her tight. “I’m glad you told Caroline. You can tell her anything you need to. But now I want you to tell me.”

After a minute, she begins again. “Mom tried to send me back in. But Dad said, ‘No, stay, you should see this, you should see what happens to—’ ”

She stops.

“It’s okay. Tell me the parts that matter.”

“I was so scared. I wanted to be brave, like you would’ve been if you were there, but I was so scared and I didn’t know what to do. I told him to put the gun away. He pointed it at me. Don’t talk back to me, Francine. Mom was crying, and Bo was moving, but I wasn’t paying attention with the gun on me. I was looking at Dad. And then Dad—”

She chokes on another sob.

“It was so loud, West. And red, bright bright red, everywhere, and I didn’t understand what was happening until Bo started apologizing. I didn’t even know Bo had a gun. He shot Dad. It was my fault, because if I hadn’t come out Dad wouldn’t have pointed his gun at me, and Bo wouldn’t have killed him, and Mom—”

Now she’s crying. It’s awful, f*cking awful to hear it. My baby. My Frankie.