Deep (Chicago Underground #8)(66)

I flinched, already imagining where this was going. A tale as old as time. “Marco?”

“Yeah. Yeah. At first I didn’t know who he was, that he had any idea who I was.”

“When did you find out?”

“One time when I was at his apartment I found some newspaper clippings about Philip Murphy. I still wouldn’t have put it together, but there were pictures of you. Photographs, taken from far away.”

“God, Tyler.”

“I know. I think up until that point…I mean, I didn’t know. I didn’t understand any of it. Maybe I didn’t want to understand. Because he explained it all to me, and I just…believed him.”

My throat was tight. “What did he say?”

“That Philip had taken what was his. I mean, that part wasn’t hard to believe. Everyone knows that Philip Murphy is a criminal. And I knew that Marco didn’t have… much. I mean, it seemed like a lot to someone like me, still living at home. His own apartment, a job. That kind of thing. But it wasn’t a stretch to imagine that Philip had hurt him the way he said.”

“Right,” I said, wishing I could totally believe it. But there were still too many questions, questions that I now had a right to ask. I just didn’t want to. “So you didn’t know. That’s…that’s okay, then. We’re okay.”

Tyler had been the only person really there for me. The way our mother now hounded Tyler about how he was doing, whether he was okay…she hadn’t done that for me. They’d pretended like I didn’t exist, the dark shadows under my eyes a threat to their happy existence. It had been a relief when I moved into the dorm. Without me around they could pretend that they had never owed a debt so big and so bad that armed men had dragged their daughter from a club, used me to satisfy the debt. Without me they could pretend that they had never adopted a daughter they didn’t end up wanting. Only Tyler had held me in the bathroom while I’d cried.

“No,” he said, sounding hoarse. “Because he also said that you… I had told him about you. Personal things. Secret things. How I had always been jealous of you.”

“Wait a minute. What?”

“God, Ella. You’re so strong, so confident. You can do whatever you want, and it doesn’t matter what our parents say or think. You’re just you.”

The words hit me like bricks, pushing the breath right out of me. That he could look at me and see something good, something strong, when I’d thought I was weak all along. Weak and hungry for love.

“And me,” he continued, sharp with self-derision. “I don’t even know who I am or what I am. And if I so much as stand up, Mom and Dad would clap for me—like I’m some kind of idiot who needs all this extra support just to…just to exist.”

So my parents’ favoritism had managed to f*ck up both of us. Awesome. “Tyler, you’re young. You don’t have to know everything you’re doing right now.”

“Only two years younger than you,” he reminded, and then he shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. I mean, you’re amazing, but I should have just—I should have just left it at that. And not compared us. Marco had this whole thing about how you were screwing me over, just like Philip had screwed him over. And I knew, I knew even then that it was wrong, but I was just so wrapped up in him that I would have believed anything.”

I knew how love could make you stupid. How sex could make you stupid. It was pretty much in the definitions. “So you…went along with it? His plan?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I did. I didn’t know that he planned to hurt Philip. He never showed me a gun until… First he said we would just lay low, like some kind of backward Atlas Shrugged.” He laughed roughly. “As if we were running the world. Everyone would notice we were gone, and they’d miss us. And meanwhile we could hole up in some kind of twisted honeymoon, having sex and smoking pot and—”

He sighed with his eyes shut, defeat written in tired lines across his young face.

“It’s okay,” I said softly.

“How can you say that?” He looked affronted, and it charmed me to realize he was offended on behalf of me. “I went along with the stupid plan, knowing that you and my parents would worry about me. That was the idea, that you’d go to Philip for help—and then Marco would make you pay to get me back, money that would replace what he lost, what he should have had all along. It was f*cked up.”

“It was f*cked up,” I agreed softly, but I had seen too many f*cked-up things in the world for this to shock me.

“And then the days kept passing, and I started waking up from this hazy drugged state—and realizing that this wasn’t okay. This wasn’t okay at all, and I needed to go home and set things right. Only, he wouldn’t let me leave.”

Like when Philip had locked me in his bedroom. Neither had a great deal of respect for other people’s personal freedoms. Though there was an important difference. Philip had kept me in that bedroom to protect me, to shield me from a dangerous meeting where I could have gotten hurt.

“He wasn’t right in the head,” I said softly, repeating Philip’s words.

“No,” Tyler said, a quiet grief underlying his words. “He wasn’t.”

I stood and opened the bathroom door, knowing enough time had passed. I crossed the small room and picked up the little plastic test. Sure enough, bars had appeared in the clear window. Not pregnant.