“You’re wrong—”
“Are you really stupid enough to finish that sentence? I’m not wrong. If you knew what he did, if you heard what he did…” Abby’s voice cracked. She kept squeezing Missy’s arm, taking pleasure in hearing her whimper. “Are you seriously trying to tell me you never once saw a glimpse of the monster that ruined my sister? Not once?”
Missy hesitated. Abby wanted to destroy this woman; she wanted her to pay for what she’d said on the steps of the jail.
“Monsters don’t breathe fire, Missy. The monster in this town is a real man who teaches high school English. A man who’s kept a sex slave locked in his basement for years, and his wife was too dumb to know about it.”
“Stop it. Please, stop it.”
Missy had begun to cry, snot streaming from her nose. Abby loved watching this woman crack. She fed off Missy’s distress like carrion after a road kill.
“Admit it, you stupid bitch. Admit you knew something was off. You did, didn’t you? Didn’t you, Missy?”
“Yes… I mean, I didn’t know for sure but… but he was gone so much. I knew he wasn’t writing a book. And I saw websites. Things he wanted to do. But I thought…”
“That as long as he still put on his V-neck sweater and came home smelling of cologne and chalk dust and told you about his day at work, as long as you still had barbecues with the neighbors and missionary sex once a week, you could forget about what you saw.”
“I’m so so…”
“Don’t. Don’t waste your breath on useless apologies. ‘Sorry’ is a word. An empty, meaningless word. And what he did, what you let him do, can never be erased by a word.”
Missy was sobbing uncontrollably now. Her father appeared in the doorway, his face an angry red mask.
“You need to leave.”
Abby moved closer to Missy, her voice a whisper. “If you go on TV again and call my sister a liar, I will kill you.”
Missy broke down. Abby ignored Missy’s father’s shouts and threats and headed out of the house.
By the time she climbed back into her mother’s car, Abby was grinning. Lily might not be speaking to her. She might not know how much Abby cared. But Abby was going to do whatever it took to make sure these people never fucked with her sister again.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
LILY
Tears are for the weak.” That’s what Rick always preached. Before Rick took her, Lily was a crier. She cried at anything. Country music. Hallmark movies. A YouTube kitten video.
“My little softie,” her father had teased her. But Lily didn’t cry over the news about Wes and Abby. The news had stunned her. Wes. Her Wes. Her first love. The boy who—with one look—had made her feel as if the entire world had fallen away.
Lily couldn’t stop thinking about Abby’s giant belly, her sad eyes and heavy features, the scars lining her wrists. How had all of this happened? How was it possible that her sister had fallen for Wes or vice versa? They’d disliked each other with an intensity that bordered on irrational. Abby kept going on and on about how cliché it was that Lily was dating a jock.
“His only marketable skill is hitting a ball over a net. And he barely talks, like he’s some kind of superhero. He thinks it makes him deep and brooding when it really just makes him an asshole.”
Wes thought Abby was a stuck-up bitch and hated that she was always a third wheel. They’d both driven Lily crazy with their stupid bickering, constantly forcing her to take sides. And now they were together. They were having a baby together.
Lily had wanted to scream at Wes, to ask him why he hadn’t waited for her. But that wasn’t fair. No one, not Abby, not Wes, not even Lily herself could have imagined that she would return home. She knew all of this rationally, and yet the pain was searing.
She’d been lying in bed for hours. Sky was fast asleep but Lily couldn’t stop her mind from spinning. She’d never allowed herself to wallow in self-pity, to ask why me. There wasn’t mental energy to waste dwelling on something she couldn’t control. But now that’s all she could think about. Why did she get Rick, and Abby got Wes’s love and devotion, and his baby? Why did Abby get a nice, kind man? Because I’m not worthy, that’s why, Lily thought.
Abby got to have Wes’s baby, and Lily got Rick’s. The thought made her ill, thinking back to those nights Rick would whisper his fantasies as he violated her over and over again. And here she was, pregnant with another child. Rick’s child.
“How far along am I?” she’d asked Dr. Amari at the hospital after she’d delivered the news.
“It’s early. Only six weeks. You can still terminate.”
“You mean kill it?”