Behind Every Lie(84)

I wished I had time to say it.

As the blood seeped out of me, I realized there was a terrible sort of symmetry to my death. I had done what I always planned to do—I’d saved Eva. And with that realization, I was able to forgive myself.

“It’s … okay.” Blood dribbled, hot and sticky, out of my mouth.

A huge weight was crushing my chest. I could not catch a breath. Eva thrust the coat away, pressing her hands to my throat. “Mom. Don’t try to talk. I’m going to call the police.”

I smiled, a universe of sadness filling me at everything we would lose, a solar system mapping planets of pain and sorrow. I wanted more, so much more, but oh, how grateful I was for the time we’d had. Love, a mother’s love, is infinitely expanding, like the universe we exist in. Eva taught me that.

“My girl,” I whispered, my breath bloody in my throat. “You healed me.” I coughed, a wet rattle. “You’re stronger than you think. Trust … that. Promise.”

“I promise, Mom.” Eva was crying, tears drawing streaks down her bloodstained cheeks.

There was something important I had to say, that I had wanted to say since that day so long ago, standing on the edge of an icy lake. I grasped her hand, gave it three weak squeezes, and whispered the words: “I. Love. You.”

My gaze drifted up, to the painting of daffodils hanging over the fireplace.

“Find her.…” I said, my voice failing me. “Your mother. Find …”

And then I whispered her name in Eva’s ear.





forty-six

eva




WHAT HAVE I DONE?

The thought charged at me, stark and unrelenting. Blood was everywhere. Under my fingernails. In my mouth. In my hair. It was streaked across my shirt. On the floor, it blackened and congealed, filling the air with its metallic breath. The sickly sweet scent clung to the back of my throat.

My mother was slumped on the floor in the living room, mouth gaping, brown eyes staring at nothing. A dark pool of blood seeped like molasses from a gaping wound at the base of her neck. The urgent beat of her pulse had faded to an unrelenting nothingness.

Both my hands were clamped around her throat. An emotion thudded so viciously in my chest it was painful, like searing.

“Mom!” I tried to scream.

But only a choked sob came out.

I looked at her glassy eyes, and a grief so fierce I couldn’t help but howl cinched around me.

This was my fault. Sebastian had stabbed her because of me, because I tried to run.

I started to shake uncontrollably.

All the memories we shared bore down on me. She was my protector, my guardian, the one who’d held me in her arms when I cried after a bad dream. She’d wiped my tears and tucked me into bed. Her cool hand had brushed the hair from my feverish cheeks when I was sick. She’d taught me to play chess and build a tree house and stick up for myself when boys bullied me.

I’d been so blind, so selfish and self-involved, all the while I’d stupidly ignored her many small gestures of love: leaving the light on when I was out late; waiting up to see I was safely home; double-checking the tire pressure on my car; making sure there was always a fire extinguisher in the house; putting a can of mace in my purse.

She’d showed me she loved me the only way she knew how. She was my safe place, my home, my roots. And then I touched her cold cheek, already gray and slack, and she was none of these things.

She was gone.

And my heart shattered into a million pieces.

I tried to move. I needed to call the police. But an intense wave of dizziness walloped me across the head.

I stood, my legs like rubber bands, but Liam’s voice came to me from very far away. “Wait. Eva, don’t go!”

His words triggered a memory.

Wait. Eva, don’t go!

Flashes of an alley slick with rain.

Someone calling my name.

The words burst in my ears like tiny grenades, sending me tumbling backward in time. Everything froze; time hung suspended, like it was holding its breath. The moisture drained from my mouth.

“No.” I shook my head. I was wrong. I was looking for things that didn’t exist.

Wasn’t I?

But Liam had come to the hospital after I’d given birth. He’d been there at the club the night I was drugged. He’d followed me outside, watched as I threw up. I could feel his hand on my back, hear his soothing voice.

Come with me, we’ll get you all cleaned up.

“It was you,” I said. My hands were shaking. “You were the man I went home with that night. The man who raped me.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Eva!” Liam was giving me that look—scrunched brow, pinched frown—that meant he pitied me, that I couldn’t trust myself. But there was something else there, something unfamiliar. A shift to his eyes that scared me.

I stared at him. I knew I could be wrong about what I was thinking, what I remembered and what I didn’t.

But then I heard those words echo again in my mind—Wait. Eva, don’t go!—and I knew I could trust myself. More than that, I knew I had to trust myself. I couldn’t let him control me anymore. Because those words were real, and the voice saying them was Liam’s.

“Hurry up. Get this tape off me right now!” Liam was now using his low, authoritative voice, the one I never questioned.