A Lesson in Vengeance(28)

I swallow. The back of my throat feels like it’s covered in grit. “Right.”

For a moment we both stare at each other, Ellis’s eyes unblinking over the frames of those rickety pince-nez.

I try not to think about the abortive scream as Alex fell, cut off too quickly as she hit ground. I used to hear it everywhere: in my nightmares, in movies. Right now it echoes in the hum of the old record spinning on the turntable by the front desk, the music gone silent, static prickling at our ears.

I didn’t want her to die. I never wanted her to die. But I’m not innocent, either.

That’s the thing the doctors kept missing at Silver Lake, with their trauma therapy and white pills and cloying pity: That I’m the reason she died. If I hadn’t been there, if I hadn’t walked into Alex Haywood’s life, she’d still be alive.

Ellis is looking at me like the doctors did, now—examining me, dissecting me for her goddamn book the same way those doctors might have used me for case studies. Like I’m confused, or misguided, or broken. Like I’m incapable of killing an ant, never mind a girl.

“I swear to god,” I say, “if you tell me it wasn’t my fault—”

“I wasn’t going to say any such thing.”

“Good.”

She lifts a brow. “It was an accident. Everyone knows that. Everyone who read the papers, anyway.”

I break first. I look away, down at the book still held against my chest. The dust threatens to make my eyes water.

“Yes,” I say. “Well.” The papers don’t tell everything.

Silence stretches out long and taut—easily broken.

I slide the book back into its place on the shelf. When I’m turned away from Ellis, it’s easier to speak. “Everyone says I’m a murderer.”

“You aren’t a murderer. I research murderers, I should know.”

I make a sound that’s meant to sound derisive but comes out strangled, bitter—as if this whole scenario could get any more humiliating. I rub the heel of my palm against my brow, not that it does much good.

“Hey,” Ellis says, and she has both hands on me now, grasping my shoulders to look me in the eye. “Hey. Listen to me. The death wasn’t premeditated. You didn’t have malevolent intent. You loved her.”

That isn’t what Alex said. Alex insisted—she’d insisted—that I couldn’t possibly love her, that I didn’t want her, I just wanted to own her. It had been so…unfair, so brutally and callously unfair, as if the past year of our relationship had meant nothing to her.

I grimace. “I know. I know I didn’t murder her—not really. But…we’d been fighting. I was still so…so angry at her. And maybe if I hadn’t been distracted, maybe if I’d…if I’d paid better attention…”

Maybe I could have saved her.

I can’t know for sure. How can I prove, even to myself—?

I know I’m not a murderer, but the difference between murderer and killer seems insubstantial sometimes. I was responsible for her death.

Our argument feels ridiculous now. We’d been fighting about the same thing we always fought about: Alex had called me spoiled, said I didn’t appreciate how lucky I was to have grown up the way I did. It was the kind of comment that never hit well with me. Especially not when we were staying in Colorado, with my mother, with my mother’s empty wine bottles and empty words.

If Alex and I hadn’t fought…maybe I would have made a different choice.

Or maybe I would have gone down with her.

“You couldn’t have saved her,” Ellis says. “It was an accident.”

She must be able to tell I’m unconvinced, because she sighs. She takes the hat off my head and puts it aside, as if she needs to see me properly.

“It was a long time ago,” she says. “It’s done now.”

It doesn’t feel done to me.

Whether Ellis is using me for her story doesn’t seem to matter anymore. All I can think about is the spaces between the words I just said, all the confessions I didn’t speak aloud.

How could I explain the way Alex’s accident was the period at the end of a very long sentence—the conclusion of a long-owed debt?

I’m afraid if I close my eyes I’ll find myself back there, one year ago, with the candles and the incense and witches whispering in my ear. With that ritual Alex and I tried to enact, the one that Alex ruined, the ritual that cursed us.

“We were climbing Longs Peak,” I say. “We’d gone home to stay with my mother. For…Christmas, you know. We’d begged and begged her to let us go off and do one peak alone. Alex was…very persuasive. It was December, so we’d expected storms, but…”

When I close my eyes, I still see white. Everything there was white, the snow blinding.

Only the storm had come later.

“They never recovered the body, so they couldn’t do an autopsy to be sure, but we’d both been trained to recognize pulmonary edema. When you’re up at that altitude, sometimes it…Your lungs can start to fill with fluid. That’s what happened to Alex. She was in a lot of pain and starting to find it hard to breathe, so we…The most important thing at that point is to get down to a safer altitude as quickly as possible….”