Put Me Back Together(96)

Her face was buried in my father’s shoulder, but she reached blindly for my hand and I caught it, too shocked to do anything else. I looked at Lucas, my mouth hanging open. I’d imagined this conversation a thousand times in my head. I’d expected screams, accusations, even contempt. I’d expected her to be outraged at my perjury on the stand. Never once had I imagined this.

“You’re sorry?” Emily cried, jumping to her feet so quickly her chair fell over behind her. Her eyes were rimmed with red, her cheeks pink with emotion.

Oh no, Em, I thought. Not you. You’re the one who’s always on my side. You’re the one who loves me no matter what.

Her lips quivered as she stared down at me. “You’ve been lying to me about this for six years? What happened to ‘twins tell each other everything?’ How could you keep this from me?”

I looked at her beseechingly. “I-I wanted to tell you, but—”

“Brandon was your boyfriend? Brandon’s been stalking you? Brandon killed Tommy because you told him to? Who are you? You are not my sister. That is not my sister’s life!” She smacked her hand down on the table so hard the umbrella shook above us.

“Emmy,” Dad said, a warning tone in his voice, “you have to think of what she went through. Think of it from her point of view.”

“I am her point of view!” Emily shrieked. I don’t think anyone at the table understood what she meant, but I did. We were sisters, twins. She’d followed me to Queen’s without a second thought. I texted her every day. Her friends became my friends. We defended each other, pulled for each other. When we were little we believed we had the same thoughts. She was mine and I was hers, but I’d betrayed that. It was an epic breach of trust.

I could say nothing in my own defense.

“It tore her apart to lie to you about it,” Lucas said, “you more than anyone else.”

“You don’t know anything about it,” Em said, holding up her hand as if to block him out entirely. “You’ve been in her life for, what? The past five seconds? I’ve been hers since birth!”

“But I saw it right away when she told me,” Lucas persisted. “You were the one—”

“You told him before me?” Em said, and this time I had to meet her eyes, to see the tears coursing down her cheeks. She was slipping out of my grasp. I couldn’t take the coward’s way out and shut my eyes as I lost my only sister. “I will never forgive you for this,” she said. Then she turned and ran into the house. We could all hear her crying loudly through the open door as she made her way up to her room.

“You know how she is,” my mother said as she wiped at her smeared mascara. “She’ll cry it out and then she’ll come around.”

“I’ll talk to her,” Dad said. “It’ll be fine.”

But I wasn’t so sure. Neither of them knew Em the way I did. I’d seen her hold a grudge for years over a suspected stolen hairbrush. It had seemed funny then; we’d laughed about it together, back when we were always on the same side.

My parents wanted me to stay the night in my old room. They offered to make up the guest room for Lucas. But I couldn’t stand the thought of spending the night listening to my sister bawling in the next room, or to be separated from Lucas by an entire hallway. When I told them Lucas would be getting a motel room and I’d be going with him, my father cleared his throat and wandered off into the dining room. Shockingly, it was my mother who seemed to understand that I needed Lucas that night. Maybe it was the way Dad had held her as she’d cried that made her see that sometimes closeness is something you need more than anything else.

“You go, darling,” she said, pressing a wad of bills into my hands. “Go with him, as long as you promise to come back.”

“I’ll always come back, Mom,” I said. “Thank you…for surprising me.”

“Thank you for giving me the chance,” she said.

We left them with promises to talk more, share more, tell more. I knew telling the story was just the beginning, that their anger toward me might still be waiting in the wings. The road to the truth would be a long one, but we were on it now. I’d put us on it.

As the cab pulled away from my parents’ house, I saw Emily peering out at me from her bedroom window. She didn’t wave.

I was right. Telling the truth was exactly like setting off a bomb. We’d all survived, all except Em, who would struggle through the night on life support as we all waited, as I waited, to see if she would come back to me.





24





We checked into the most expensive hotel I could think of. In her emotional state, I think my mother had pressed a few more bills than she intended into my hand, but I had no qualms about spending them. I was spent. I wanted to sleep the night in two-hundred-dollar sheets and order way overpriced room service and bathe in a tub so big I could swim in it. I wanted to indulge my every whim. So that’s what we did.

Lucas kept talking about the size of my parents’ house. I hadn’t really told him how wealthy they were, mainly due to my mother’s practice. He acted impressed, but I think he really just wanted to take my mind off of Emily.

“How many bathrooms are there, again?” he asked as we dug into our room service meal. He’d ordered a fancy burger and I’d ordered filet mignon, which came with a baked potato that was carved in the shape of a rose and carrot slivers woven into a basket.