Put Me Back Together(82)

Then there was the media hounding my family every time we left the house, and the wrenching guilt as friends and neighbours poured out their sympathy, encircling me with a concern and affection I felt I did not deserve. Tommy’s funeral, which I attended under protest. A school year done and a summer of living under self-imposed house arrest. Then a new year began and I had to face high school as this new, darker version of myself, to withstand the looks that followed me everywhere I went. But they weren’t looks of accusation, only pity, only disgust at the mess I’d made of myself.

A year passed before the trial began and I had to relive that day in the woods all over again. Brandon’s lawyer tried to pin the murder on me, but I was too good of a liar by then. Too practiced. Too sympathetic. Brandon eyed me with silent hatred whenever I was in the courtroom, and I kept my gaze lowered, destroying my hands, praying I would get away with it. In the end he got the maximum sentence possible in youth court: six years in custody and four years’ community supervision. The papers railed against the fact that he couldn’t be tried as an adult, but he was too young, He was only twelve. Ten years was the best they could do. By the time he turned eighteen he would be back out in the world. I prayed that day would never come, that something terrible would happen to him in that place. Because I knew he would come for me when he got out and I would have to answer for my lies.

“But the day did come,” I said. “It was that day I called you over to help me watch Ethan.”

Lucas leaned his cheek against mine. “I remember reading the headlines. If only I’d known… Your freak-out over Ethan makes a lot more sense now.”


“He’s the same age Tommy was,” I said sadly. Though Ethan would grow older, Tommy would always be five years old. Tommy would never grow up.

Because of me, I thought, then corrected myself. No, Katie, because of Brandon.

I described my need to escape the Vancouver suburb, my home, which had, over six years, become a stifling prison. I needed to be somewhere no one knew I’d been a victim of the Kindergarten Killer. So I’d applied to art programs out east and picked Queen’s on a whim, moving across the country with my sister in tow to escape my past.

“Except it caught up with me,” I said.

Then came the hardest part: telling Lucas the whole truth of Brandon’s assault on me over the last two months, from the first Facebook message to the texts he’d already read to the break-in. Though it pained and frightened me to see his anger, I had to let him pace and rage as I recounted the worst of it. I had to let him express his frustration, his desire to rip Brandon apart, and believe he never would. It was almost harder than telling him about the murder itself. Watching Lucas’s muscular arms ripple with tension brought out a terror in me that was all too familiar.

He’s not Brandon, I reminded myself. Lucas is on my side.

But this truth was harder to swallow, because hadn’t Brandon been on my side, too?

When I told Lucas about the crumpled message in my bag and explained that he must have been in the coffee shop with us, his face went blank—with anger or fear, I couldn’t be sure—and he was silent for a long time. We sat together in this quiet, leaning on each other, holding each other. Even though he didn’t say a word, those moments of silence meant so much to me—almost more than any profession of love. I’d been sitting in the dark for so long. I’d never realized how much I’d been yearning for someone to sit there with me and hold my hand and let me feel his heart beating insistently under my palm, telling me I wasn’t in this alone.

“I won’t let him hurt you,” Lucas mumbled into my neck as we lay down together on his bed. “I’ll stay with you always. He won’t be able to find you behind me.”

He put his arms around me protectively, holding me tightly even as he drifted off to sleep. There was comfort there, but also dismay. Lucas thought he could hide me from Brandon, but I knew the truth.

Eventually he would find me.





21





When I woke up the next morning, Lucas was gone. I stared at the empty space beside me in the bed for a long minute, trying not to blame him for running. If anyone understood the urge to run, it was me. I sat up in bed with a heavy sigh.

“Morning, Hero,” Lucas said. “I got you a hot chocolate.”

Snatching my glasses off the nightstand, I turned my head to find a fully dressed Lucas sitting on the bare mattress on the other side of the room, a newspaper spread out in front of him. Not only was he awake before me, but his hair was wet so it even looked like he’d showered.

Smiling so widely my cheeks hurt, I padded across the room and kissed him on the side of the head before accepting my drink.

“Didn’t think I left you here, did you?” he said teasingly. Apparently my sigh hadn’t gone unnoticed.

“Not at all,” I said mildly. “I was just regretting the idea of sleeping over here in your pygmy-sized bed. The crick in my neck regrets it, too.”

“Agreed,” Lucas said with a laugh. “All future sleepovers will be conducted at your apartment where there is not only a double bed but also no roommates. Luckily for us, Danny is trying to spend all his free time with his girlfriend before she leaves for her internship.”

My brain snagged on the words “future sleepovers” and didn’t even take in the rest. My heart did a little flip at the idea that Lucas was still thinking of a future with me despite everything I’d told him. Then I remembered how many times he’d told me he loved me the night before and my heart did a double flip.