I sat down hard in one of the Lucite chairs at the dining room table. All I could do was blink at the words on the screen, forming sentences that shouldn’t make sense.
The whole dining room wall was doors, and Jack entered through one of them. Between the doors were floor-to-ceiling mirrors, with the same on the wall behind my back, and the uncertain smile on his face reflected back and forth, back and forth, into infinity. “Hi,” he said. “I’m sorry I reacted to the hair like that. I was just surprised.”
I squeezed the phone in my hands. “Of course.” My voice was hollow. “Of course you’d be surprised that I’d want to do anything you don’t agree with.”
“Avery,” he said. “I’m sorry. You look beautiful with any—What’s wrong?”
I held up the phone. “I was checking texts. I thought it was mine.”
He looked confused for just a second, and then his face fell a thousand times over, taking the whole room with it. I pushed the phone across the table.
“Avery—”
“That is how they knew what we were doing in Paris,” I said calmly.
Jack sat down hard opposite me. “God. No. This isn’t—”
“Isn’t what it looks like? Then what is it? Because it looks like you’ve been telling my sister everything. And lying to all of us about it.”
He spread his hands on the glass-topped table. I held my breath. Maybe there was another explanation.
“I was keeping you safe,” he said, and everything inside me shattered.
“That was not your choice to make.”
“Lydia promised she’d send people to watch out for you, without getting in our way,” Jack went on.
I held up my hand, pieces clicking together in my head. “Every time I thought I saw somebody watching us, and you pretended it was nothing—all those were Saxon people?”
“It was the only way,” he pleaded.
It hurt. My chest actually hurt, enough that I couldn’t help grasping at the front of my shirt. It was like my insides had exploded into a million shards.
“I had no idea what she was really doing,” Jack said. “I found out when you did. I would never have—”
“Just stop.” I looked out the doors, past white columns and hedges cut into an archway down to the drive. “Do the Saxons know we’re here?”
“Absolutely not. I haven’t been in contact with her since yesterday, and she’s never been able to trace this phone. You have to understand, Avery. Your father wouldn’t have let you go to Greece if they didn’t have security on you. They wouldn’t have let us go to Paris alone yesterday.”
I should have known it was all too easy.
“And they actually have been working on the clues—”
“You told them about the clues? All of them?” I rested my head in my hands. “Were you in contact with her even before we decided to go to them in the first place?”
“Do you really think we could have stayed hidden in Paris as long as we did? They would have tracked you down. And that way they could have security on our apartment—”
I made a sound like I was choking. “And you’ve been doing all this with Lydia.”
Jack’s hands clenched into fists, leaving streaks of his fingers on the glass. “I thought she was on our side. We all wanted to stop the Order—and Lydia knew you needed space. She didn’t want you to feel like you were being watched—”
“But I was!” I jumped up, tamping down the pain with indignation, because that was a little bit easier. This was humiliating. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen it. “Did it have to be Lydia, of all people? Besides being a Saxon, she’s a girl you’ve had a thing with.”
Jack’s head snapped up.
“Stellan told me, since he’s the only one who tells me anything anymore. I don’t care that you have a history with other girls, but I do care about you lying. After all this family member and the help stuff? And God.” I ran my hands through my newly short hair. “Lydia? She looks like me. She’s me, but a Saxon.”
Jack was shaking his head. “Which you’re not. That’s the whole point. I mean, you are, but not in the important ways. You two are nothing alike.”
I shoved the chair in hard enough that it almost toppled over. “But this whole time you’ve been saying we shouldn’t be together while you went behind my back to her.”
“To keep you safe! And you’ve been going behind my back talking to Stellan about things you should be asking me about.”
“That is not the same thing.” I heard footsteps cross the floor above us and tried to lower my voice. This was bad enough without Elodie and Colette listening. “This isn’t about Stellan.”
“It’s not? You haven’t been picking fights with me lately because of him?”