“So what’s the alternative, Lucie?” Ethan demanded. “Do nothing, because someone hurt you once? Let other people be hurt and killed, let the cities burn, and keep smiling and doing absolutely nothing?”
“What’s your suggestion?” I asked. “Send someone else to do something? And when that someone you sent is killed, you will do what? Oh, that’s right. You do absolutely nothing except talk. You couldn’t make yourself shut up at the council meeting, you talked on the television, and you accomplished nothing. Don’t tell me about what I’ve done and what you’ve done. I saved a man. You sent one to die.”
Ethan was white as paper.
It had always been understood between us that we did not hurt each other. It had been like a treaty written and signed by both of us, the agreement that let us be able to love and able to live with each other despite our differences. Only now we had spoken the forbidden words. I felt as if I had taken our agreement and burned it before his eyes.
I was terrified suddenly, as scared as I was angry and sick over Jarvis. I remembered how I had felt in the days before I met Ethan, how I had not felt that I could ever leave the darkness behind. I had felt like I was made of opaque black stone, not able to let in light. Until he had come, and I had learned to let his light in.
The whole city of dazzling lights had not been enough to make me feel alive, but he had.
“I thought I understood,” Ethan said in a distant voice. “When you hid how you felt or what you had been through from me. I hid things from you as well, anything that I thought would scare or hurt you. I thought . . . that this world is terrible sometimes, and we were both trying to protect each other. But if the truth is that you despise me . . .”
“Yes,” I whispered. “Yes, sometimes. And if you’re hiding things from me, you despise me, too.”
I had not thought about it as despising him before, but what else was hiding the truth from someone because you thought they were too weak to deal with life as it really was? It was a statement that you could not trust them, that they were not worthy of trust.
He did not think I was worthy of trust either.
If he had been hiding things from me, how weak did he think I was? How weak had he always believed I was?
Maybe he was right. I had not spoken up for Jarvis. I had let him be sent away. I had been a coward again, deserting him as I had deserted my mother. I hated myself, and it almost made me hate Ethan.
Fear, grief, and sickness all seemed to twist in me, burning and alchemizing. I thought of my Aunt Leila, years ago: she had never hesitated and never, ever wept. She had been angry, and she had acted. She had known what to do, and what I should do. I wanted to be just like her. All I wanted to feel was fury.
“I don’t despise you,” Ethan protested. “I love you.”
I thought of my father, my poor father, and all the secret resentment and weariness I felt when he suffered.
I turned my face away from Ethan. “If you think loving me means you can’t despise me,” I said, “you’re a child.”
“What if I told you everything that I’ve been hiding from you?” Ethan asked, and his voice was soft now, imploring. “What if you told me all you ever felt, all you ever did and felt you could not tell me? What if we loved each other and we trusted each other? What if we discovered each other, right now?”
His caressing, convincing voice did its work. I wanted to turn around and look at him, then cry and fall into his arms and whisper promises of love and trust. And I never wanted to be that weak. I could not bear to tell him what he wanted to hear.
I did turn. I did look at him. I did not cry.
“You bring Jarvis back,” I snarled. “You go and get him, save him, return him alive to his family. Then I will listen to whatever you have to say. Until then, it doesn’t matter what you say. All that matters is what you did, and that means I don’t want to talk to you or see you, ever again.”
I walked away from him. My cheap shoes made muted, dull thuds on the marble floor as I went.
When I returned to midtown and the Lorry home, I pushed open the door gently in case my father was resting. It swung silently and slowly to reveal Penelope on the sofa, home during a workday for the first time since I had known her. She sat with her face in her hands, and I stood staring at her, paralyzed with guilt and trying to nerve myself for the inevitable onslaught. She had let me and my father in from the dark and the cold, she had shared her home with us, and I had destroyed her family. In her place, I would have wanted to kill me. She would have had every right.
Penelope lifted her head and stared at me. Her big dark eyes were glittering with tears, like lakes with treasure lying in the bottom, drowned and lost. She looked as young as her own daughter.
“Oh, Ladybird,” she said, her pet name for me almost swallowed by a gulping sob. “I’m so glad you’re here.”