Behind Every Lie(77)

We were sitting too close, so I moved a few inches. I noticed a tattoo on his right arm. Grayish-purple clouds curled from under his T-shirt sleeve, streaks of jagged lightning forking down the top of his bicep.

I pointed at the tattoo. “Where … ?”

Jacob glanced at his tattoo. “This? I got it in Venezuela. I was photographing the lightning strikes of Lake Maracaibo. It’s the most electric place on earth. One of the guys I was working with said that in Venezuela, lightning means strength and illumination.”

I shrugged my coat off and showed him the marks left on my skin by the lightning. They were almost the invert of his tattoo. As if someone had laid a sheet of tissue paper over mine and used a coin to emboss them onto him.

Jacob ran a finger over the marks. Goose bumps prickled along my skin at his touch. “We match,” he said, so softly I had to lean closer to hear.

Our eyes met, and he withdrew his hand, clearing his throat. “So, what was it you wanted to tell me?”

“Oh, Jake.” I stared at a photo on the wall, the only photo Bill had hung of Jacob. He was four, maybe five years old and he was sitting in a swimming pool in the backyard. Bill was lifting the hose over their heads, the water shimmering in the light as it fell onto their faces. They were both smiling. I looked at Jacob, confused and disoriented. Nothing was ever as it seemed. “I had a baby.”

“What?” He ran a hand through his hair so it stood on end. “When?”

“After I was raped, I found out I was pregnant. I couldn’t keep her. Not after that night. So I gave her up for adoption.”

I pressed my fingers into my eyes, trying to stop the tears.

“I felt so …” I tried to articulate my emotions, the shame frothing up inside me, hardening like beaten egg whites. “. . . ashamed and mortified. I didn’t want to hate her for something that wasn’t her fault. Something she had no memory of. So I gave her up.”

“Eva—”

I held up a hand. “Please. I need to finish.”

Jacob nodded.

“I’ve thought for a long time that I couldn’t trust myself, because if nobody believes you, if the police don’t believe you, how can you trust yourself?” Only flashes of that night had stayed with me. The crack that ran the length of the ceiling. How hard the bed was. The turning of a door handle. Was my lack of memory a blessing or a curse? “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before.”

Jacob looked surprised. “You don’t need to apologize to me. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

I got up and crossed the room, trying to get a bit of space. I wasn’t saying it right. I took a long, shaky breath and tried again.

“I think I killed my mom. I don’t know if it’s possible to fix myself. But I do know I have to make amends for what I’ve done. So I’m going to turn myself in. I might go to jail for a long time. But before I do, I needed you to know the truth about why I never called you back. The reason I ran away.”

Jacob half-stood, a look of alarm on his face. “What is it?”

“The night we slept together was just a week before I was attacked,” I said. “The baby I gave up for adoption, Jake. She could be yours.”





forty-one

kat




that night

I STARED AT THE WORDS on the bathroom mirror.

I

Found

You

The adrenaline and fear were too much. I heaved forward and vomited, the tea I’d drunk earlier swirling around the drain. I rinsed my mouth and dabbed it with a wad of toilet paper. I suppose on some elemental level I knew one day Seb would find me. He was not the sort of man to forgive a betrayal.

I felt like such a fool. I had become complacent, and now he was here, ready to ruin the life I had built for myself.

Suddenly angry, I wiped the words off the mirror with a tissue. I would not let him frighten me.

I walked downstairs, my hand slippery against the banister. Outside, wind thrashed against the house and a flurry of rain galloped down the windows. My neighbor’s floodlight went on. I entered the living room, and there he was, Sebastian, my husband, sitting on my couch. He held a cup of tea in his hand, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to be here after all these years.

Time had not been kind to him. He looked rather older than I knew him to be. Smaller and more shrunken. His skin was pockmarked, scars nicking his cheeks. His nose was crooked, as if it had been broken many times. Dark stubble sprouted on the lower portion of his face, his blue eyes small and beady. His dark hair was thin and streaked with gray.

My mind flitted to the gun locked in a storage cupboard upstairs. I’d bought it after Eva moved in, hoping to reassure her that she was safe. But then she’d left, and it had sat locked away ever since. It did me no good now. I couldn’t even get to it.

He smiled, revealing stained yellow teeth. “Hello, Katherine.”

“Sebastian.” I hid my shaking hands in the folds of my trousers. “How did you get in?”

He made a scoffing sound at the back of his throat. “That lock couldn’t keep a teenager out.”

“The alarm—”

“Oh, you mean this alarm?” Seb rose and went to the alarm panel near the door. He typed in a series of numbers and the alarm beeped and disarmed. “You were always so predictable, Katherine. I knew it would be our daughter’s birthday.”