Lies I Told(47)

I was turning the corner, ascending one of the peninsula’s steep hills, when I saw the figure coming toward me. Shrouded by the mist, almost blending into the early morning twilight, there was something familiar about the gait, the slight stoop to the shoulders. He was only a few feet away when I realized it was Parker, wearing the same hoodie he’d been wearing the night before when he’d vandalized Logan’s car.

He slowed down as I approached. “Hey.”

“Hey,” I said.

“Mind if I join you?”

I shrugged, and he fell into step beside me. For a few minutes we walked in silence, our companionship like an old friend in spite of everything that had happened.

“I’m sorry,” he finally said.

I glanced over at him. Even in profile, I could see the dark circles under his eyes, his sallow complexion. “For what you did to Logan’s car or for jeopardizing the job?”

We were outside the War Room, out in the open where anyone could hear. But somehow I couldn’t find the energy to care.

He looked at me. “For putting you in that position.”

“I’m not the only one exposed here,” I said.

His eyes were unwavering. “You’re the only one I care about.”

I shook my head. “And what do you think would happen to me if the job went bad? If something happened to you or Mom and Dad?”

His laugh was bitter. “Trust me, you’d be fine without ‘Mom and Dad.’”

We came to a dead end, the sidewalk stopping at a chain-link fence. A field of brush lay past it, and beyond that the ocean. Parker bent down, lifting up a piece of the fence that had been cut. I ducked under it and waited for him to follow, the unspoken language of longtime allies flowing between us. Following a path through the overgrowth, we stopped at the edge of the cliff, the water frothy and violent below us.

I dropped onto the ground and looked out over the sea. “We’re all in this together. If one of us goes down, we all go down.” I paused, trying to figure out where things had gone so wrong. “I guess I just don’t get it.”

He looked at me. “What?”

“What’s changed? Why now?”

His gaze tracked the seagulls gliding in circles over the water. “I see how you look at him,” he said softly. “At Logan.”

The flush of humiliation warmed my face, as if he had unearthed my deepest secret, laid it bare for us to inspect and analyze.

I didn’t look at him. “Haven’t you ever liked someone? Gotten attached?”

He was silent so long I wondered if he’d heard me. “There was someone once.”

I looked at him, surprised by his honesty. “Who?” I thought back, trying to guess. “That girl in Seattle? Maya Richardson?”

Maya had been Parker’s mark. I’d spent a lot of rainy afternoons with her younger sister, Lacey, watching movies in the family room with a fire blazing in the giant fireplace. They had been nicer than a lot of our marks.

He shook his head. “Her little brother, Ben.”

“Ben?” I only vaguely remembered him, a small, quiet boy with dark, glossy hair and eyes that had seemed too big for his delicate face.

Parker nodded. “I played basketball with him when it wasn’t raining, built LEGOs in his room when it was. He . . . well, I think he looked up to me.”

“You told Mom and Dad that Maya and Ben were close,” I said, remembering. “That you could get on her good side by spending time with her little brother.”

“It wasn’t a lie,” he said.

“But that’s not all there was to it.”

“No.” He hesitated. “He was so innocent. It was like . . .” He shook his head. “I don’t know. Like seeing myself. The kid I could have been if I’d had parents with boring jobs and a house in the suburbs, the kind who put out presents from Santa at Christmas and pretend to eat the cookies left by their kids.”

“Was it hard?” I lowered my voice. “Stealing from them?”

The job had been simple: steal the savings bonds purported to be somewhere in the house. After two months of snooping, Parker had found them in a couple of shoe boxes at the top of the parents’ closet.

He picked up a rock and tossed it angrily over the cliff. “Turns out the bonds were for Maya and Lacey and Ben. For college. Their parents had been buying them since the kids were born. They weren’t even rich.”

Dread swept over me. It was the dread of sudden realization, like I’d been swimming in the shallow end only to extend my legs and find that the bottom was nowhere to be found.

“But you took them anyway.” We’d stuck around Seattle for two more months, but no one had ever said a word. I wonder how long it took the Richardsons to realize the bonds were gone.

He looked at me. “I lost something on that job, Grace. Some . . . I don’t know, some part of me that still believed I was redeemable. That believed I could be someone else someday. And it was because I stole from Ben. Because I cared about him and I stole from his family anyway.”

I didn’t know what to say. It had never occurred to me that Parker had a conscience about what we did. His loyalty to our parents had been less than enthusiastic, but he had never openly questioned their motives until we came to Playa Hermosa. Until it had been to protect me.