The panic slammed into me with a force that took my breath. And then my next thought, Not in front of the cameras.
But I couldn’t think about that. If this was really happening, if Heath was finally going to talk to me, Cerny’s secret backup cameras were beside the point. I threw off the blanket and crawled off the bed. Knelt at the chair and grabbed his hands. He gripped mine back so tightly that a fresh wave of panic sluiced through me.
“I’m not good for you,” Heath said. “You deserve—”
“No.” I shook his hands. “I love you. I love you more than you could ever know, and whatever you had to do to survive, I understand. And I forgive you, without even having to know what it was. That’s how much I love you.”
He pressed his lips into a tight line. I could tell he wasn’t convinced.
“I won’t judge you, I swear. I had to do things to survive too.”
“You don’t understand—”
“Please, stop. Just listen to me.” I pressed his hands to my chest. I was sure he could feel my heart racing.
And then, I suddenly knew. I was going to do it.
I am going to tell him everything.
“I did a terrible thing,” I said. “It was a long time ago, but it changed everything. And to survive, to stay sane and function in the world, I had to keep it a secret.”
I didn’t know what I expected him to do. Leap out of the chair? Faint with shock? Suddenly regard me with disgust? Whatever dramatic reaction I’d imagined, he didn’t do any of them. He just studied my face like it held a secret he wished he could be privy to.
“You’re an angel,” he said.
“I’m not.” I shook off his hand. “I’m . . .”
. . . half-savage and hardy, and free . . .
“You are an angel,” he repeated dully. “You’re trying to make me feel better. And I love you for it.”
“You don’t know what I’ve done.” I tried not to think of Cerny’s high-tech spy cameras consuming my pain, crushing it to ones and zeros and storing it until the doctor decided to watch it.
“What? You stole a pack of gum at the dollar store? You cheated on a chemistry exam? You had unprotected teenage sex behind the bleachers with a boy everybody told you to stay away from?” His expression grew distant. “This is different. If I told you this, you’d leave. I know you would.”
“You’re not Jeffrey Dahmer, are you?”
He shot me a rueful smile.
“See? We’re good.”
The wind buffeted the glass panes, the loose joints and eaves of the house. I could feel the pressure inside me, building. We’d both kept our secrets, kept the doors shut and locked tight. And now, I had the worst feeling that those doors were about to burst wide open. That our secrets—beasts with claws and fangs and foul breath that had grown in the dark and transformed into something hideous—were on the verge of escaping.
He spoke again, his voice deliberate. “I don’t know where we go from here, Daphne. I don’t know how to go forward anymore. I’ve done things I’m ashamed of. I am a fraud. A perpetrator.”
His face was still, a mask of calm, his eyes glittering in the semidarkness. He didn’t look ashamed. He looked unflinching.
“I used to think I could be in a marriage where we kept secrets,” he said. “I don’t anymore. I know we’re both scared as hell to do this, but one of us has to bite the bullet. One of us has to lead the way.”
There was a moment of quiet, then I spoke in a low voice. “I’ll do it.”
“Really?” He looked surprised. “That’s what you want?”
Yes. It was what I wanted. Finally, after all this time of covering up and running from the truth, I wanted to show Heath who I really was. I saw then, in the darkness, the way his lip curled up and his head tilted to one side, and I knew it was what he wanted too. This moment would draw us even closer, our dark confessions. This moment would bind us forever.
He was ready to hear my story. And I was ready to tell it.
“I killed someone,” I began, my voice trembling. “I hid the evidence, and no one ever knew.”
Chapter Seventeen
I found out the meaning behind Chantal’s smile a couple of days later, when Mrs. Bobbie called Omega and me back to her bedroom.
Earlier that afternoon, the ranch girls had spilled out of the bus and streamed down the long red-clay drive, ready to get down to the business of the weekend. We’d slung off our backpacks in our bedrooms and scattered to our own activities for a few hours. Fridays were chore-free. For Omega, that meant trooping off with the other Super Tramps, toward the lake and the clubhouse.
For me, it meant figuring out wherever Chantal happened to be and making sure I was as far away from that place as humanly possible. Sometimes that was the clubhouse, but the last couple of times I’d gone down there, Mr. Al had shown up, and Omega had told me to scram. I was happy enough to comply. I’d made a chart for myself of all the books I’d finished since Mr. Al had first taken me to the enormous library in Macon after we’d gone to pick up my new glasses. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone was my seventeenth. And anyway, I’d spied on them before, and all they ever did was sit around and smoke lumpy-looking cigarettes.
Our small Christian school’s puny football team was playing a nearby public school that night, and Mrs. Bonnie had promised that Mr. Al would load all us girls in his ancient minivan and take us to the game. Not only that, she said we could swing by the pizza parlor with the old-fashioned pinball machines beforehand. But around four o’clock, when I saw Omega and Mr. Al approaching me where I sat cross-legged on the dock with Harry Potter, my gut flip-flopped nervously.
Omega’s head hung low and her eyes kept to the ground. I didn’t think I’d ever seen her like that—she usually had such a defiant tilt to her chin. Alarm rippled through me, even though they were still several yards away. All my foster-kid alarms were going off, in fact, readying me for fight or flight. I closed the book, laid it to one side, and I scrambled up. Began methodically popping my knuckles, one by one.
“Hey, Daphne-Doodle-Do,” Mr. Al said when they reached the dock. “I need you to come on up with me to the house. Mrs. Bobbie wants to talk to y’all for a minute.”
I glanced at Omega, but didn’t move. Omega was staring at the ground, her shoulders hunched into her hoodie like she wanted to disappear.
“What about?”
“Come on now,” Mr. Al said. “It’ll be over before you know it.”
Which must’ve meant he didn’t know what this was all about either. But that wasn’t a surprise. It hadn’t taken me but a week at the ranch to figure out that Mrs. Bobbie was the ringmaster and Mr. Al was the clown that cleaned up the elephant poop. Now that I thought about it, he was looking every bit as miserable as Omega.
My palms pricked with adrenaline. I wondered if the trouble was about what Mr. Al and the Super Tramps did outside the clubhouse. I didn’t know any specifics, but maybe Mrs. Bobbie had suspicions and she wanted me as a witness. I didn’t want to tell on anybody, but I also didn’t want to make Mrs. Bobbie my enemy.