We Told Six Lies(76)

Her mind grew fuzzy.

Molly had never in her life felt so much pain, and then, in a rush of adrenaline, it left her. She was left with only peace. Her heart beat in her ears, and her eyelids began to flutter. She was frozen, suspended in time.

Holt jerked, and his eyes fluttered, too. His legs kicked as if he wanted to resurface but his body wouldn’t cooperate. His entire body jerked again, and his arms released her.

The world lost all dimensionality. Became a path forking in the woods. One path led to the unknown—filled with some happiness, but also heartache and pain. On the other was only peace.

Was this the cold whispering in her ear? Wishing only to keep her body for itself? To suck on her marrow and lick the salt from her skin?

Or was this something darker still? Was it her past that told her to succumb to the icy waters, or was it her version of the future? Had she really sunk below the tide to kill him, or to do to herself what she’d always thought of in her quietest moments?

She closed her eyes to see how it felt, and her body floated toward the bottom until her back touched the silt. The pain from the cold had long vanished. Now it was only her heart thumping far too slowly, her lungs squeezing, searching for air. Finding none and slowly relaxing. Her gaze flicked to Holt, and she watched as his eyes slipped closed. Twice he clawed at the water as if trying to find a way up. But he’d waited too long. Maybe she had, too.

That final thought was her undoing. That she no longer had a choice. Nothing scared Molly more than exhausted options.

With a determined start, she told her body to kick upward. But her legs didn’t comply. And when she screamed internally for her arms to swim, they only brushed loosely against her sides.

This was how Molly Bates would die, and only when she realized that did she grasp how deeply she wanted to live. This was supposed to be a murder, not a suicide. She opened her mouth and found her throat still worked. Molly watched, half lucid, as little bubbles raced from her mouth to the surface.

Her body jerked the way Holt’s had, and Cobain’s face flashed in her mind. She loved him. Maybe she only knew that for certain at that moment. When her life was slipping away. When she had only death’s hand left to hold.

Her heart—her compass—had been broken when she left. But it wasn’t Cobain who broke it.

She’d done that to herself.

Her body jerked a second time, and agony rocked through her. A shot of adrenaline surged from toes to nose—her body’s final stand—and Molly captured it. She maneuvered her feet beneath her, and, feeling as if her spine would snap in two, she shot upward. On her way to the surface, she saw Holt’s body dragging along the ground, rocked gently back and forth like a newborn baby.

When Molly surfaced, she filled her lungs so mightily that every creature on earth lost their breath for a moment. Then she gasped for a second and third time, and the world was put right again.

She cried from fear and from the cold and because she wasn’t certain that she could make it to shore. She couldn’t feel her arms as they reached out and tugged at the water, and it may have been her imagination, but she felt much farther away than when they’d dunked themselves under.

She made it a few feet before she turned back and watched the place from which she came. For one mind-warping moment, she considered going back for Cobain’s brother. Could she really leave him there to slowly decompose beneath the water and slushy ice?

She turned and swam for shore.

The jerky movements sent blood coursing through her body, warming her if only enough to reach land. When her feet touched the muddy bottom, she cried out. Hung her head and wept. She’d killed someone. She killed someone, and she’d nearly let herself die along with him.

Molly collapsed onto the ground and groaned like a dying animal. But she wasn’t dying. She was alive. Just look at the color returning to her ice-kissed skin. Just look at the way her chest heaved for more, more.

She fumbled onto her back and stared at the sky, thinking only one word over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over—

Freedom.

Molly sat up.

And she saw him.

Cobain’s brother stood hip-deep in the water, teeth chattering, body shaking. The embodiment of rage.

Molly’s heart shotgunned in her chest.

She scrambled backward as he powered toward her, his torso cutting through the pond. It bowed to him—the water and the ice and the entire kingdom of trees that witnessed his furious approach.

“Together,” he said, his voice holding a dangerous growl. “You…said…together.”

His words were broken from the cold.

She was broken from the cold.

But she found her feet anyway. Rose, stumbled twice, and then began to run.

He ran, too.





NOW


I run faster as I try to remember real Holt versus Holt from my imagination. When I push open the front door, I’m assaulted by the smell of dust. I search the room—the sagging couch, the sofa chair, the record player Holt always loved toying with.

I find a door to another set of stairs and take them down. I’m so terrified of seeing my brother that I’m afraid I’ll collapse. But there’s anger there, too. Because this guy I no longer know took something important to me. He took the most important thing.

When I reach the bottom of the stairs, I have to steady myself against the wall. Another memory comes crashing to the forefront of my mind.