The Becoming of Noah Shaw (The Shaw Confessions #1)(39)

Mara also knows she didn’t deserve what’d been done to her. But in Horizons, I saw this tiny cell of guilt—the thought that she accidentally killed her best friend—turn into shame when she believed she killed her friend to save herself. It grew every day, cancerous, threatening to eat her alive.

Maybe it finally did. I may not know everything about Mara—it seems I know less than I thought, but I know this—she would never let anyone be violated the way she’d been again. Stella might not get it, but I do.

“Mara came in. She killed him, and you got out.”

“Yes, but—”

“She saved you.”

“You weren’t there!” Her words tear at the trees, sear the air. “You didn’t see her face when she walked back to the truck. You didn’t see her expression when she decided to kill these two dumb college kids for practically nothing—”

What?

Tears begin to fall. “You don’t know about the subway. The train tracks. Jamie and Mara haven’t told you.”

“Look, Stella—”

“It wouldn’t matter to you that Jamie forced these two assholes onto the subway tracks to punish them for urinating on a homeless woman and calling him a—” She stops, and the word she doesn’t say hangs there, sick and poisonous.

“They were racist, and horrible,” Stella says, sniffs. “But they didn’t deserve to die.”

“Did they?”

“Did they what?”

“Die?”

Another head shake. “Jamie just wanted to scare them. But Mara”—she breaks into another laugh, chilled—“she was going to kill them. She kept them there, I don’t know how—their noses began to bleed and—”

The droplet of blood from Sam’s nose that ran over his lip, fell into the puddle beneath his swaying body.

A slight smear of blood on Beth’s first knuckle . . . as if she’d wiped her nose just before jumping.

The weight of everything I realise I don’t know about Mara, didn’t want to know, is suddenly too much.

“They didn’t die,” Stella says, letting out the anger she has left. “But they would have. Jamie stopped her from killing them. Otherwise—” She stops, breathing hard, wipes her eye with her wrist. “You weren’t there.”

And there it is. That bruise that won’t heal, the fracture still splintered. And she’s pressing on it. Bending it. Waiting for me to break.

I’m so tired, suddenly. A wave of exhaustion crests, pulls me down with it. I want nothing more than to leave Stella there in the park and sleep. Forever.

“You’re right, Stella,” I say casually. “I wasn’t there. And you weren’t there when she sacrificed her own life for her brother’s.” Both brothers, in fact, but I leave that bit out. “So what are you trying to say, exactly? That she’s a monster? Bringing death and destruction in her wake, wherever she goes?” The minute I say it is the minute I realise that that’s what my father had been saying about her. How he tried to persuade me to kill her.

Stella lets out a shivery breath. Her eyes flutter closed. “What I’m saying is that she’s not who you think she is. She’s changed.”

My head feels numb. I can’t do this much longer. “And you haven’t?”

“Of course, I changed too.”

I nod. “You left Mara and Jamie—”

“And Daniel,” she adds.

“But now here you are, fetched up in Brooklyn after abandoning them—”

“It wasn’t like that—”

“But you’re lecturing me about Mara, who’s given more of herself for the people she loves than you will ever know.”

The transformation is instant. Her face hardens, and she takes a step back, crunching dead leaves. “How much, Noah?”

“What?”

“How much of herself has Mara given up?”

When I don’t answer, Stella says, “You don’t know what she’s given up either.” She’s the one to turn around first, to start walking away. But she tosses one look, one sentence, at me as she leaves.

“But you will.”





23


TENDER MERCIES

WHEN SOMEONE IS HIDING A secret in a house, something changes in the air. Unspoken words, half-finished smiles, eggshell steps—they distort reality, they muffle truth.

The person with the secret is changed by it—she smiles, but the corners of her mouth don’t quite reach the height they used to. The corners of her eyes don’t crinkle as deeply. The look in her eyes when she tells you she loves you—there’s something behind it. You don’t know what it is—what has she done?

Mara is many things, but a cliché isn’t one of them. If she does have a secret—and she does, I know that now, after that night with Stella, see it in everything she does—her secret isn’t a person. It’s a thing. A thing I can’t know, because it would change us.

What Mara doesn’t know is, it already has.

You can’t keep a secret from the person you love and expect it not to change him, too. She doesn’t trust me with something, which makes me distrust her, and that makes our hands miss each other when we pass something over the table. It makes my mouth just miss hers when I lean to kiss her lips and end up with cheek instead.