The Cage(98)

No one talked about Bay Pines. No one asked her how bad the cafeteria food was or if any of the girls had attacked her. Her father had made a long toast to her return. Then the guests had left, and her parents got into one of their marathon fights and her mother stormed out, and the maids cleaned the spilled champagne, and Cora went outside to look at the night sky.

Whether she was looking up from Bay Pines or Fox Run, whether her family was together or broken, at least the stars had always looked the same.

Her father joined her, and for the first time since the night of the accident, they were alone. They exchanged a few words about the upcoming election, and the fight he’d had with her mother over the guest list, and then he’d leaned over the railing, with no warning, and let his gin glass slip into the bushes below, and covered his face with his hands.

It was the first time Cora had ever seen him cry.

“I didn’t know what to do,” he said, between sobs that made the loose skin on his neck tremble. He was already bald by then, and his manicured fingers clutched his head as though it needed to be held together. “I’d had too much to drink. I was so angry with your mother, threatening divorce.”

It had taken Cora a moment to even realize he was talking about the night of the accident, because he only ever spoke about it in vague terms, and only if he had to. As a senator, he’d always been coached in what to say, so it was rare to see him open up like this. She watched his fingers fumbling over his bald scalp, searching for something, anything. He looked older than she’d ever seen him, and it was the first time she realized that one day he would die.

“It eats at me. It should have been me. My little girl spent eighteen months in that place, and all it would have taken was a single phone call, a single confession, and you would have walked free.”

He had collapsed into a sobbing collection of tired eyes and world-worn fingers and wrinkles that hadn’t been there before that night.

Cora leaned against the railing next to him. She had tried hard not to think often about the night of the accident. That terrifying plunge off the bridge, the car filling with water, shivering together on the shore, her father reeking of alcohol. Sitting among the wet grass, she’d thought through what would happen next. The police would arrest him. He would lose his senatorship and his reputation. Her family would lose their livelihood. Her mother would divorce him for real. She and Charlie would lose a father.

Below, in the garden, the shattered pieces of his gin glass reflected the moonlight. She remembered each day of those eighteen months. The fights in the shower. The leering eyes of the guards. The lights that stayed on all night. At the time, it had seemed an eternity.

“It was my choice, Dad.” She had glanced back through the windows at her house, where her mother slept on the sofa and Charlie played video games. She felt like she was looking into another person’s life. “I wouldn’t have suggested it if I hadn’t known the consequences. I knew exactly what I was doing when I told the police that I had been behind the wheel. I was saving our family.”

“I never should have gone along with it.” Her dad sobbed. “I should have confessed. I should have served the time.”

Cora had reached over and covered his large old-man hand with her small one. “It’s okay, Dad. I knew what I was doing.”

She had lied to him plenty back then, but not that night on the porch. It was okay. Her father worked too hard, and was away from home too often, but he loved her. She knew him—she loved him—and she never once blamed him for going along with a decision that she had made on her own. Lucky had it all wrong, when he thought that her father had forced her to take the fall for him. She had never been a victim. Not once in her life. It had been her idea to take the fall. There on the banks of the river, waiting for the police to come, she had practically forced her father to agree. And even after the conviction, and after the divorce happened anyway, and after juvie, and after coming home and knowing that she would never belong again, she had never once regretted it.





UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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47

Cora

“HE’S MY FATHER,” SHE whispered. “I had the ability to help him. It’s what anyone would have done.”

Cassian didn’t answer. In his eyes she saw herself reflected: tangled hair, delicate features, dark under-eye circles. Taking the fall for her father didn’t mean she was brave. It certainly didn’t make her a paragon of humanity.