Page 86 of Thicker Than Water
“You’re welcome to go back in,” Diane says to me and Sienna. “He’s sleeping, but if you just want to be with him, you can.” She rests her palm on the door handle, the offer lingering.
Sienna’s fingers unlink from mine. I study her face, watching the color drain from it.
“Are you all right?” I whisper.
There’s a sheen of sweat on her forehead, and now she’s clutching her collar like it’s trying to strangle her.
“I can’t,” she says, and she spins around to run.
I follow without hesitation. Doors whiz by, the floor squeaks beneath our feet, and Sienna charges into the empty family lounge, where she puts her hands on her knees, gulping for air.
I place my hand on her back, which heaves beneath my palm as if she’s retching. But the only sound from Sienna is the whoosh of her breath.
“I can’t,” she says again, hunching lower.
I hunch too, keeping my hand firm along her spine.
“I can’t go in there again. I don’t know how to sit with him. Or look at him. I don’t know how to see the brother I loved.”
Sienna pants, out and in so violently that my hand is almost pushed from her back.
The words slip from my mouth: “Cool your fire.” I regret them instantly. Whatever thrashes inside her now, whatever keeps her gasping for air—it’s all real, and warranted, and it shouldn’t be stifled or extinguished.
“Sorry,” I say, “you don’t need to—”
“We’ve lost him.” Sienna stands upright, forcing me to straighten with her. She spins around to meet my eyes. “We’ve lost Jason.”
“No. The nurse said he’s fine. That it’s normal what—”
“I don’t mean he’s dead. Just—the brother I knew, the brother I thought I had, is dead. He watched Clive take me upstairs, even though heknewI was drunk! Just like he watched Gavin take Maeve home when she was blacked out. And hekilledhim, Jules!”
The last sentence fires from Sienna, a stray bullet ricocheting around the room. She recoils, as if feeling the kickback of it, a bruising punch to her body.
I feel it too—the impact of the accusation. I know what it’s cost Sienna to say it, what she’s lost of herself in the process.
“Let’s just recap,” she continues anyway, her voice hard. “From all his rambling at the end, this is what I got: Jason took Gavin’s phone, Gavin got mad, went after him, Jason took out his knife to protect himself and ended upstabbinghim. Then he told Maeve to leave so he couldtake care of it. Take care of it! Like the man bleeding in front of him was a spilled drink he had to clean up. And then we know exactly how hetook care of it. He suffocated him. He—” She drops onto the couch, digging her forehead into the heels of her hands. “Oh my god, he sewed up his lips!Why?Why did he do that?”
She picks up her head, eyes expanding with horror, picturing itfor the first time: Jason with the needle, Jason with the thread he wove in and out of Gavin’s mouth, stitching it shut, an act of revenge against—what, exactly? The words Gavin once said to Maeve in the warehouse? Why did he bother with that final, gruesome step?
And where, during the panic of “taking care of it,” did he even get the needle and thread?
In the cresting, overwhelming wave of all the evidence against him, thewhyof Gavin’s stitched lips is a question I sidelined. Now it sticks in my mind, gumming up my thoughts.
“How could he do this?” Sienna cries. “Whoever that man is in there, back in that room, I don’t know him. I can’t—”
She’s cut off by her own sob. She tilts her head back, as if trying to reverse her tears, even as they drip down her cheeks.
“All this just to soothe his own guilt! Over me and Clive. Over Maeve and Gavin at the holiday party. Oh, and let’s not forget his reasons. He didn’t intervene with me because he didn’t want to seemuncool. And with Maeve, he didn’t want Gavin to deny him apromotion. Such stellar motives! No wonder he stood back both times!”
It’s jarring to hear her speak like this, critical and caustic, when it comes to Jason. But his confession shattered something inside her, hammered against the glass that’s protected the picture of him she’s held all these years, ever since he rescued her from Clive.
It’s horrible to witness, the breaking of everything she believed in.
As tears slice down her face, I sit beside her. Her cheeks are drawn, her eyes narrowed, head shaking back and forth. I wrap my arms around her, and she’s so rigid, her shoulders as hard as marble.
“You were right,” she says, staring at the wall across from us. “You tried to tell me he did it, and I wouldn’t listen. I excused every piece of evidence, even thougheverythingpointed to him. I don’t know why Henry Hendrix lied about his alibi, or why the hell Wyatt’s protecting him, butclearlyI was wrong; Henry, Gavin’s deals,his goddamn cash in the gutter machine, had nothing to do with it. It was always Jason.”
She pivots toward me, gaze wet and sorrowful. “You were right,” she says again, her body softening a little. Then she rests her head against mine, curving her arm around my back until we’re locked together. In an instant, tears pool in my eyes, spilling onto my cheeks.
