She clutched the end of my bed, arms shaking. “All that money . . . all your dad’s insurance money and more, for all those years. It was for nothing now. He remembers. He told the EMTs on the way here—he’s telling the nurses, he’s telling everyone. Everything I did for him . . . for all of you . . . was for nothing.”
“Look at me, Mom.” I raised my broken hand and tried to gesture at my burns. “He did this to me.”
She closed her eyes rather than look at me. “I would’ve saved you, too, you know. I would’ve done the same for any of you.”
I swallowed with difficulty. “You would’ve spelled me—without my knowledge—for the rest of my adult life?”
“I gave him a life. I gave it to all of you.” She kept crying, snot mixing with the tears and dripping onto her shirt. “Why did you have to ruin it?”
She seemed to totter, and both Dev and Brian—and me, reflexively, from lying down—moved to help her stand. She was crying too hard to talk anymore and so she allowed herself to be led out of the room by Dev, leaving me alone with Brian.
Brian watched them go.
“They’re going to prosecute her for obstruction of justice,” he said, as if to himself. “I resigned.”
My stomach sank. “She’s going to jail?”
“They want to do something. Statute of limitations is up on the Madrigals’ fire, so this is all they have.”
“I didn’t think . . .”
“Of course you didn’t.” When he turned to me, his face had lost some of the cop stiffness. “Why didn’t you tell me what was going on?”
“You didn’t want to know.”
“That’s not—”
“Sure, you want to know now—now that something’s happened.” I took as deep a breath as I could and tried to speak quickly before he could interrupt. “But back before—when you thought I was pissed and sad about Win—you wanted me to shut up and be cool.”
His eye twitched. “I wanted you to be happy. That’s what everyone wants for their family.”
“Yeah. Exactly.”
He looked out the window into the just-rising sun. “You’ve always been so angry with us. I never understood why. You didn’t have a bad life, you know.”
I wanted to tell him that the life he and my brothers had given me wasn’t ever truly mine. But even though he was trying his hardest to listen, I didn’t think he’d understand.
He exhaled. “We could’ve fixed it together, if we’d known. But not now.” My eyes drifted closed; it didn’t block out his voice, which stayed eerily calm. “You really have no idea what you’ve done, Markos. We had each other’s backs, but do you think anyone’s going to have your back again, after this? After what you did to me and Dev and Mom and Cal?”
I kept my eyes closed. It was easier not to see him. To think of him only as a voice. “I think you should go.”
“I’m your brother.”
“Just go away, Brian.”
I kept my eyes closed until I heard footsteps and the door close. I couldn’t be sure if that was it—if it was over, if I was no longer a Waters, if we were done. I’d asked him to leave and he’d left. It seemed too easy.
But not easy at all. Because now I was alone.
When I opened my eyes, Diana was standing in Brian’s place at the head of the bed, looking at me.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “Everyone I love is either dead or hates me.”
She smiled for a second and then her face crumpled like she was going to cry.
“Diana—what’s wrong?”
Her eyes flitted over my face—my burns, underneath the bandages. Probably full of pus and blood, stinking of rot. I was hideous, obviously. But it shouldn’t have made her that weepy.
“Where are your parents? What did they say?”
She shook her head. “They checked in on me while you were asleep. They’re worried, but it’s okay. They understand.”
“Understand what?” I’d been pumped full of drugs so that nothing hurt physically, but it still tore me up to look at her and see her upset. “Please. Tell me.”
She took a shuddering breath and came around the side of the bed, where she sat carefully, without touching any of my damaged skin, and then curled up on her side next to me and rested her head on my pillow next to my bandaged face. “I’m scared, because”—she swallowed—“because I’m going to trust you again and that’s totally terrifying.”
I held my breath and managed to raise my arm so that she could lean her head onto an unburned part of my chest. She could probably hear my heart beating all over the place, but for the first time in hours I smelled something other than lighter fluid and flesh and gauze and hospital. I smelled her hair.
The only thing that could make her leave was me. It had always been that way since the night of the bonfire, when I could’ve crushed her spirit or made her night, and I chose to do neither. The fate of this—us—was in my hands. I could make it work or fuck it up again.
The difference now was that it wasn’t only her fate at stake anymore. It was also mine.
“I’m scared, too,” I said.
She must’ve understood all that because her breath lost that hesitant catch and she settled in to my chest more comfortably.