In My Dreams I Hold a Knife(34)

“Explain,” Eric said, with a strange measure of calm.

Courtney pointed at Frankie. “He just confessed. Call the police!”

“I didn’t kill Heather,” Frankie said, hanging his head. “But I…did something terrible. That night.”

“What’d you do, man?” Coop ran both hands through his hair, making it stand up straight. “Tell the truth; set yourself free.”

“If we’re going to talk about this, we should call the cops.” Caro looked at Frankie. “He should have a lawyer.”

Frankie shook his head. “I’ve kept this secret for too long.” He looked up at Eric. “I’m so sorry.”

“For what?” Eric paced slowly in front of Frankie, watching him.

“The night of the Sweetheart Ball, Heather got really, really drunk. Like, blackout. Courtney told me she needed to go home, so I took her.”

All the heads in the room swung to Courtney.

“Um, no, do not look at me like that. Heather was really upset at Jack. She said she wanted to forget her whole night. I’m not about to deny a girl her therapy.” Courtney tossed her hair over her shoulder. “Besides, how was I supposed to know to worry about Frankie? He was one of you stupid East House Seven.”

“Nice, Courtney,” I said. “Way to take her home yourself like a good friend.”

“Shut up. You weren’t even around. She kept thinking you were going to show at Sweetheart, but you never did.”

I jerked back like she’d hit me, but it was the truth.

“What happened when you took her home?” Eric pressed.

Frankie’s eyes darkened. “I got her to her suite, no problem. But when we got inside, she didn’t want to go to bed. She wanted to talk.” Frankie’s voice cracked. “She was going on and on about how Jack betrayed her. That night, he’d told her he’d been cheating on her, and she was devastated. She always thought she was going to marry him. I really didn’t want to talk about it, especially when she was drunk.”

He looked at Eric, pain in his eyes. “I tried to put her to bed, but she didn’t want to lie down. I finally got her in Jess’s bed, since it was the closest, but we kind of wrestled for a second, and then…she fell and hit her head. I didn’t think it was bad at the time, you have to believe me, but after…after I found out what happened, I kept worrying—what if I gave her a concussion and it kept her from fighting back when the murderer came?”

So that’s why Heather was found in my bed. I’d always wondered, assumed she’d simply been too drunk to tell the difference.

“That’s why you climbed to the top of the bridge?” Eric’s voice was made of steel. “Because Heather hit her head and you felt responsible?”

“No,” Frankie said miserably. “It was the other thing she told me.” He looked up at me from his seat on the radiator, and I knew what was coming. “That night Jack didn’t just confess he was cheating on her. He told her he was bi.”

I caught Caro’s eyes, and she raised a brow. The news about Jack wasn’t a surprise—he’d come out after he’d been cleared by the police, saying he wanted us to know the whole him, no reservations. But the fact that Jack had told Heather the night she died was new information.

“I don’t know why she told me,” Frankie continued. “Other than she was drunk. What Heather didn’t realize was that I already knew. Because I was the one Jack was cheating with.”

A moment of incredulous silence.

He did it. Frankie had actually uttered the words out loud. Years of keeping the secret because I loved them, of covering because it was the right thing to do, bubbled over inside me.

“You and…Jack?” Courtney looked like she’d been presented with the world’s most bewildering math problem. “Together?”

Coop shook his head. “So let me get this straight. You were going to literally jump off a bridge because you were into Jack? I don’t mean to minimize what you were going through or anything, ’cause I definitely remember what your dad was like, but that’s a little Lifetime movie, don’t you think? I mean, Jack was handsome. Who wasn’t attracted to him?”

Frankie shook his head. “It wasn’t that. I mean, yes, I was carrying a lot of shame back then. I would’ve done anything to keep people from finding out. And then Heather, of all people—my friend who I felt so guilty about, because of Jack—wanted to talk about it. Really talk about it. And even though it was about Jack and not me, I couldn’t stand it. I just wanted her to stop talking. I was trying to pull the covers over her, and she was resisting, and then she fell.” He looked at the floor with wet eyes. “I hurt Heather because she made me so uncomfortable, I couldn’t stand to be in the room with her one more minute. That’s what horrified me. It wasn’t the kind of person I wanted to be.”

“I kept thinking, over and over, that I’d hurt Heather because I was trying so hard to hide, while Jack had the guts to be himself. I always used to talk about my dad, how he’d hate me if he knew, but Jack’s parents were just as bad. And he still did it. I went to the bridge that night because I kept imagining my life, and I couldn’t see a way I would be happy if I couldn’t be myself. But I also couldn’t imagine ever being brave enough to give up on the NFL, on everything I’d worked for. Jack used to say I didn’t have a very big imagination, and he was right.” I could hear the traces of something close to love in Frankie’s voice—still, after all these years—until he cleared his throat. “That was before I knew what Jack did.”