Crash & Burn (Tessa Leoni, #3)(87)

It comes to me for the first time. I shouldn’t have had to save Vero. This woman, Vero’s mom—that was her job.

“The dirt is heavy,” I tell her now, my words hard, clipped, biting. “Wet and solid. I can’t move my legs. I can’t move my arms. I’m trapped. Pinned. Suffocating. I really am going to die.”

“I’m sorry,” Marlene whispers.

“Just when I think I can’t take it anymore, the weight settles. The caretaker leaves. His job is over. Now mine begins. As I wriggle and wrestle and tug and pull. I fight, fight, fight my way out of the grave. I burst out of the dirt into the middle of the storm, gasping and heaving and covered in mud. I return from the dead.”

Lightning forking across the sky. The feel of rain upon my head. And air, pure, blessed air, which I draw into my lungs over and over again. I laugh, I cry, then I curl into a ball and completely break down. Because I am alive. And all it cost me was my best friend, my only friend. The sister of my heart.

I let go of Marlene’s hands. Suddenly, violently, I push away from her. “I knew what would happen.”

She doesn’t know what to say. Standing near the table, Wyatt takes a step closer, as if thinking he should intervene.

“I knew she would overdose. She was tired, depressed. She was an addict, unable to help herself. And still I let her see where I hid my stash.”

“Baby,” Marlene begins.

“Don’t! You knew there were dangers in a park. You knew what could happen to unattended children. Still you drank and took Vero there.”

She shrinks back, doesn’t say a word.

I’m wild. My head is on fire, but worse, my heart is breaking. I’ve let the memory in, and now it’s that day all over again. “Just like I knew, if I hoarded the drugs, of course she might take them. Only one way out of the dollhouse, and she’d had enough. I knew. And still I did it. Because her death gave me the best shot at freedom.”

“Vero—” Marlene tries again. I shake off her hand.

“I’m not Vero! Don’t you get it? She’s not me. She’s just a ghost inside my head. She’s a past I’m still trying to save, a mistake I’m still trying to face. I don’t know; I don’t completely understand it. I wanted to see you, but I never wanted to talk to you, because I can’t do this. I can’t . . . go back. I can’t . . .” Words fail me; I don’t know what I’m trying to say. I take two steps forward, rustle beneath the pillow and grab the photo I’d found in Thomas’s jacket. “Here.” I practically throw it at her. “You want your little girl? This is all that’s left.”

Marlene takes the photo. She holds it closer, then frowns. “Who is this?”

“Vero, of course. Surely you recognize—”

“No, it’s not.”

“What?” My turn to draw up short. I blink my eyes, scrub at my temples. Finally remembering what I once worked so hard to forget has hurt me. I know I’m disoriented; I know I’m not functioning on all cylinders. But still.

“That’s Vero,” I insist. “Taken at the dollhouse. I found it in Thomas’s pocket.” I say the last sentence without thinking. Now both Wyatt and Tessa have closed the gap between us, studying the photo intently.

“No, it’s not,” Marlene insists. “I understand this picture was taken later, but that girl still isn’t Vero.”

“Are you sure?” Wyatt asks Marlene. “It’s an old photograph, not the best resolution, but the hair, the eyes . . .”

“Look at her left forearm,” Marlene instructs him. “There’s no scar.”

“What scar?” Me again, my voice strangely high-pitched.

All of a sudden . . .

Vero is back in my mind. Vero is grinning at me with her gleaming white skull. Vero, who has always felt separate from me.

“Wait for it,” she whispers. “One, two—”

“Vero has a scar,” Marlene says. “From, um, an accident, when she was three. She was pretending to be an airplane. She um, hit the coffee table.”

Except that’s not how Vero tells the story. In Vero’s story, told night after night to her roommate, Chelsea, Ronnie the wicked knight tossed the princess into the air. He hurtled her into the table: “You wanna cry, little shit? I’ll give you something to cry about . . .”

Marlene turns to me now. Real time. Real life. No memory to forget.

“Show him,” she instructs me. “Your left arm. The scar.”

I move in slow motion. I raise my left arm. I roll back my long sleeve.

I expose what I already know will be there: a long, pale expanse of perfectly unblemished skin.

I realize at last, the final secret remaining in that yawning black box of memory. The tidbit I withheld even from myself, because all these years later, I still didn’t think I could handle it. Vero lives inside my head, not because she is some dissociated version of my past. Vero lives inside my head because I’m the one who killed her.

As Marlene gasps. “You’re not my daughter.”

And Vero, triumphant as ever, yells: “Surprise!”





Chapter 30




WHO ARE YOU?” Marlene Bilek had her hand wrapped around Nicky’s wrist, gripping tight. Across from the older woman, Nicky winced in clear discomfort. “You know things. How do you know such things? What did you do with my daughter?”