Heroes Are My Weakness(85)

And then . . . bewilderment.

She shuffled through the photos more quickly. Her pulse began to hammer. One by one, the photos drifted from her lap and scattered at her feet like dying leaves. She buried her face in her hands.

I’m sorry, Leo whispered. I didn’t know how to tell you.


AN HOUR LATER, ANNIE STOOD in the bitter wind next to the empty swimming pool. Long cracks fissured the concrete pool walls, and filthy piles of snow and muck littered the bottom. According to Lisa, Cynthia was planning to fill in the pool. Annie imagined her replacing it with the fake ruins of an English folly.

Theo didn’t see her as he emerged from the stable where he’d been grooming Dancer. He was her lover, this wildly seductive man she knew so well yet didn’t know at all. Gray snowflakes swirled like ashes in the gloomy air. A sensible book heroine wouldn’t have confronted him until she’d gathered her thoughts. But Annie wasn’t sensible. She was a mess. “Theo . . .”

He stopped walking and turned to find her. “What are you doing out here?” He didn’t wait for an answer but came toward her with that long-legged gait that had become so familiar. “Let’s call it a day and go down to the cottage together.” The smoky cast in his eyes told her what he had in mind for the two of them to do when they got there.

She huddled into her shoulders. “I’ve been in the attic.”

“Find what you needed?”

“Yes. Yes, I did.” She reached in her coat pocket. Her hand trembled slightly as she pulled out the photographs. Five of them, although she could have brought a dozen more.

He stepped up on the cracked pool deck to see what she held. And when he did . . . Pain contorted his face. He turned on his heel, abandoning her.

“Don’t you dare walk away from me,” she cried as he stalked across the yard. “Don’t you dare!”

He slowed, but didn’t stop. “Leave it alone, Annie.”

“Do not walk away.” She spat out each word. Not moving a step. Staying right where she was.

He finally turned to face her, his words as flat as hers had been vehement. “It was a long time ago. I’m asking you to leave it alone.”

His expression was stony, foreboding, but she had to know the truth. “It wasn’t you. It was never you.”

He clenched his hands into fists at his sides. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You’re a liar,” she retorted, not with anger, but as a statement. “That summer. All this time I thought it was you. But it wasn’t.”

He launched himself toward her, using attack as his defense. “You don’t know anything. That day you got dive-bombed by the birds . . . I was the one who sent you to that wreck.” He was on the pool deck, looming over her. “I put the dead fish in your bed. I insulted you, bullied you, excluded you. And I did it all on purpose.”

She nodded slowly. “I’m starting to understand why. But you’re not the one who shoved me into the dumbwaiter or pushed me into the marsh. You didn’t take those pups down to the cave or write the note that sent me to the beach.” She ran her thumb over the photos she held. “And you weren’t the one who wanted me to drown.”

“You’re wrong.” He met her eyes dead-on. “I told you. I had no conscience.”

“That isn’t true. You had too much.” Her throat tightened, making it hard to speak. “It was Regan all along. And you’re still trying to protect her.”

The proof lay in the photos she held. In each one, Annie had been cut out. Her face, her body—every jagged slash of the scissors a little murder.

Theo didn’t move—he stood as straight as ever—but even so, he seemed to fold in on himself, withdrawing to that place where no one could reach him. She expected him to walk away again, was astonished that he didn’t. She clung to that. “Jaycie’s in some of the photos,” she said. “All of her.”

She waited for him to stalk away, to explain, and when he did neither, she offered her own conclusion, the one he couldn’t seem to utter himself. “Because Jaycie wasn’t a threat to Regan. Jaycie didn’t try to steal your attention the way I did. You never singled her out.”

She could feel him waging an internal war. His twin had died more than a decade earlier, yet he still wanted to protect her from the evidence of the photos. But Annie wouldn’t let him. “Tell me.”

“You don’t want to hear this,” he said.

She gave a mirthless laugh. “Oh, but I do. You did those things to me to keep me safe from her.”

“You were an innocent party.”

She thought of the punishments he’d taken for his sister. “So were you.”

“I’m going inside,” he said flatly. He was shutting her out, sealing himself up as usual.

“Stay right here. I became a big part of this story, and I deserve to know all of it right now.”

“It’s an ugly story.”

“You think I don’t already understand that?”

He separated himself from her, walking to the end of the deck where the old diving board had once been mounted. “Our mother left us when we were five—you know that. Dad escaped by working, so it was Regan and me against the world.” Every word he uttered seemed to cause him pain. “All we had was each other. I loved her, and she would have done anything for me.”