Page 226 of Wild Card 13

Her mouth parted slightly.

The answer sounded too small for the size of what she had asked. I knew that the second it left me. I had been asked for a bridge and given her one broken board. But it was true.

I dragged one hand through my hair, then stopped because I could feel the old panic moving in. The need to fill silence. The need to make the room easier. The need to talk until I found the version of myself that could survive her looking at me like that. “I don’t know how you trust me again,” I sighed. “Not tonight. Not because I give you the right answer. Not because I explain something and expect that to undo what I did.”

Dottie snored softly at the far end of the couch, unaware that the entire shape of my life had narrowed to the distance between Lucy’s knees and mine.

Lucy looked toward the fire. “Explain what?”

I had thought about this moment for years in different ways. In flashes that caught me when I was tired or drunk or driving roads I had no business taking. I imagined telling her there had been a misunderstanding. I imagined the relief in her face. I imagined anger, maybe. Questions. An argument. Some sharp, terrible, honest thing that ended with the truth finally standing between us instead of the lie my silence had let grow.

I had never imagined how brutal it would feel to understand that the truth was not enough. I looked at the fire because looking at her was too much, then made myself look back anyway.

“Samantha,” I said. “My second cousin, technically, but my family doesn’t really split hairs once somebody has shown up to enough holidays.” My voice sounded rough, scraped raw fromsomewhere deeper than my throat. “She got a migraine at Mase’s party. Bad one. Noise, lights, the whole thing. I was trying to get her meds and get her somewhere dark before she got sick.”

Lucy blinked once. No gasp. No visible collapse. No easy release of eight years of hurt because I had finally handed her a fact that should have mattered that morning on her porch. Her face only tightened.

I kept going because stopping felt cowardly and continuing felt like digging with my hands. “It wasn’t what you thought.”

The words came out exactly wrong.

Too thin.

Too familiar.

Too late.

Lucy gave a small, broken laugh and looked down at her hands. “Right.”

“Luce.”

“No, that’s—” She pressed her lips together, and another tear slipped down her cheek. She wiped it away fast, almost angry at it. “That’s great. That’s really great, actually. Good. Wonderful. I spent years thinking you cheated on me at a graduation party, but it was your cousin with a migraine.”

“She’s my cousin,” I groaned, because apparently some terrible part of me thought repetition might help. It didn’t. “And I should have said that then.”

Lucy stood sharply, like sitting beside me had turned the cushion to lava. Dottie lifted her head, ears half-cocked, but Lucy did not look at her. She crossed the living room with one hand pressed over her mouth and stopped behind the kitchen island.

The island became a wall. Stone and air and eight years of damage between us.

I stood too, but I stayed on my side of the room. Near the couch. Near the fire. Hands at my sides, every muscle begging me to close the distance and every decent part of me finally understanding that closing distance was not the same as fixing anything.

Lucy gripped the edge of the island. Her shoulders lifted once, then fell. “If it was just your cousin,” she barked, and the word just broke in the middle, “why didn’t you fight when I asked you to?”

There it was.

Not the hallway.

Not the closed bedroom door.

Not Samantha.

Me on her porch in the morning sun with no sleep in my body and fear where my spine should have been.

I swallowed, but my throat stayed tight. “Because I was eighteen and scared and stupid.”

“You stood there,” she said. Her voice rose, then snapped back down like she had grabbed it with both hands. “I asked you. I gave you the chance. I stood there and I asked you how any of us were supposed to survive the distance if I couldn’t even trust you for one night, and you—” Her breath caught. “You said maybe it was for the best.”

I closed my eyes.