Heroes Are My Weakness: A Novel

AN HOUR LATER, ANNIE STOOD in the bitter wind next to the empty swimming pool. Long cracks fissured the concrete pool walls, and filthy piles of snow and muck littered the bottom. According to Lisa, Cynthia was planning to fill in the pool. Annie imagined her replacing it with the fake ruins of an English folly.

Theo didn’t see her as he emerged from the stable where he’d been grooming Dancer. He was her lover, this wildly seductive man she knew so well yet didn’t know at all. Gray snowflakes swirled like ashes in the gloomy air. A sensible book heroine wouldn’t have confronted him until she’d gathered her thoughts. But Annie wasn’t sensible. She was a mess. “Theo . . .”

He stopped walking and turned to find her. “What are you doing out here?” He didn’t wait for an answer but came toward her with that long-legged gait that had become so familiar. “Let’s call it a day and go down to the cottage together.” The smoky cast in his eyes told her what he had in mind for the two of them to do when they got there.

She huddled into her shoulders. “I’ve been in the attic.”

“Find what you needed?”

“Yes. Yes, I did.” She reached in her coat pocket. Her hand trembled slightly as she pulled out the photographs. Five of them, although she could have brought a dozen more.

He stepped up on the cracked pool deck to see what she held. And when he did . . . Pain contorted his face. He turned on his heel, abandoning her.

“Don’t you dare walk away from me,” she cried as he stalked across the yard. “Don’t you dare!”

He slowed, but didn’t stop. “Leave it alone, Annie.”

“Do not walk away.” She spat out each word. Not moving a step. Staying right where she was.

He finally turned to face her, his words as flat as hers had been vehement. “It was a long time ago. I’m asking you to leave it alone.”

His expression was stony, foreboding, but she had to know the truth. “It wasn’t you. It was never you.”

He clenched his hands into fists at his sides. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You’re a liar,” she retorted, not with anger, but as a statement. “That summer. All this time I thought it was you. But it wasn’t.”

He launched himself toward her, using attack as his defense. “You don’t know anything. That day you got dive-bombed by the birds . . . I was the one who sent you to that wreck.” He was on the pool deck, looming over her. “I put the dead fish in your bed. I insulted you, bullied you, excluded you. And I did it all on purpose.”

She nodded slowly. “I’m starting to understand why. But you’re not the one who shoved me into the dumbwaiter or pushed me into the marsh. You didn’t take those pups down to the cave or write the note that sent me to the beach.” She ran her thumb over the photos she held. “And you weren’t the one who wanted me to drown.”

“You’re wrong.” He met her eyes dead-on. “I told you. I had no conscience.”

“That isn’t true. You had too much.” Her throat tightened, making it hard to speak. “It was Regan all along. And you’re still trying to protect her.”

The proof lay in the photos she held. In each one, Annie had been cut out. Her face, her body—every jagged slash of the scissors a little murder.

Theo didn’t move—he stood as straight as ever—but even so, he seemed to fold in on himself, withdrawing to that place where no one could reach him. She expected him to walk away again, was astonished that he didn’t. She clung to that. “Jaycie’s in some of the photos,” she said. “All of her.”

She waited for him to stalk away, to explain, and when he did neither, she offered her own conclusion, the one he couldn’t seem to utter himself. “Because Jaycie wasn’t a threat to Regan. Jaycie didn’t try to steal your attention the way I did. You never singled her out.”

She could feel him waging an internal war. His twin had died more than a decade earlier, yet he still wanted to protect her from the evidence of the photos. But Annie wouldn’t let him. “Tell me.”

“You don’t want to hear this,” he said.

She gave a mirthless laugh. “Oh, but I do. You did those things to me to keep me safe from her.”

“You were an innocent party.”

She thought of the punishments he’d taken for his sister. “So were you.”

“I’m going inside,” he said flatly. He was shutting her out, sealing himself up as usual.

“Stay right here. I became a big part of this story, and I deserve to know all of it right now.”

“It’s an ugly story.”

“You think I don’t already understand that?”

He separated himself from her, walking to the end of the deck where the old diving board had once been mounted. “Our mother left us when we were five—you know that. Dad escaped by working, so it was Regan and me against the world.” Every word he uttered seemed to cause him pain. “All we had was each other. I loved her, and she would have done anything for me.”

Annie didn’t move. Theo nudged a rusted metal bolt with the toe of his riding boot. She didn’t think he’d say more, but he went on, his voice barely audible. “She’d always been possessive, but then so was I, and it wasn’t a problem until we were around fourteen, and I started paying attention to girls. She hated that. She’d horn in on my phone calls, tell me lies about any girl I showed an interest in. I thought she was just being a pest. And then things got more serious.” He crouched down on his heels to check out the mess at the bottom of the pool, but Annie doubted he was seeing anything except the past. He went on—coldly, without emotion. “She began starting rumors. She made an anonymous call to the parents of one girl telling them their daughter was on drugs. Another girl ended up with a broken shoulder after Regan tripped her at school. Everybody believed it was an accident because they all loved Regan.”

“You didn’t believe it was accidental.”

“I wanted to. But there were more incidents. A girl I’d only talked to a few times was on her bike when she had a rock thrown at her. She fell and was hit by a car. Fortunately she wasn’t badly hurt, but she could have been, and I confronted Regan. She admitted she’d done it, then cried and promised nothing like that would ever happen again. I wanted to believe her, but she couldn’t seem to help herself.” He stood back up. “I felt trapped.”

“So you gave up girls.”

He finally looked at her. “Not right away. I tried to keep Regan in the dark, but she always found out. Not long after she got her driver’s license, she tried to run down one of her best friends. After that happened, I couldn’t take any more chances.”

“You should have told your father.”

“I was afraid to. I’d spent hours in the library reading about mental illness, and I knew something was drastically wrong with her. I even came up with a diagnosis—relationship-based obsessive-compulsive disorder. I wasn’t that far from the mark. He’d have had her institutionalized.”

“And you couldn’t let that happen.”

“It would have been the best thing for her, but I was a kid, and I didn’t see it that way.”

“Because it was the two of you against the world.”

He didn’t acknowledge what she’d said, but she knew it was true. Saw the helpless boy he’d once been.

“I thought if I made sure she never felt as if anyone was coming between us, she’d be fine,” he said. “And I was right, up to a point. As long as she didn’t feel threatened, she behaved normally. But the most innocent remark could set her off. I kept hoping she’d get a boyfriend, and then it would stop. They all wanted to go out with her, but she had no interest in anyone except me.”

“Didn’t you start to hate her?”

“Our bond was too strong. You spent a summer with her. You know how sweet she could be. That sweetness was genuine. Right up to the moment the darkness took over.”

Annie pushed the photos into her coat pocket. “You burned her poetry notebook. You had to have hated her to do that.”

His mouth twisted. “There was no poetry in that notebook. It held all her most obsessive delusions, along with some venom-filled pages directed at you. I was afraid someone would look in it.”

“But what about her oboe? She loved it, and you destroyed it.”

His eyes held a weary sadness. “She burned it herself when I threatened to tell Dad what she’d been doing to you. She saw it as a kind of sacrifice to appease me.”

Of everything he’d told her, this seemed the saddest—that Regan’s twisted love had compelled her to destroy what had brought her so much pleasure.

“You wanted to protect her that summer,” she said, “but you also wanted to keep her from hurting me. You were in an impossible position.”

“I thought I had it under control. I’d turned myself into a regular teenage monk—not talking to girls, barely looking at them for fear of what Regan would do. And then there you were, living in the same house. I’d see you running around in your red shorts, hear your chatter, watch the way you played with your hair when you were reading a book. I couldn’t avoid you.”

“Jaycie was a lot prettier than me. Why not her?”

“She didn’t read the same books, didn’t listen to the music I liked. I couldn’t get comfortable with her. Not that I would have let myself. I trashed her to Regan. I tried that with you, too, but Regan could read my mind.”