Page 94 of The Summer I Destroyed You

“I’m more worried about your mom. Or Beverly.”

I release a quiet, sad laugh. “Yeah, that makes more sense.”

Liam’s asked me no fewer than ten times how I’m doing since we left Beverly’s apartment, and I keep telling him I’m fine. The truth is both better and worse than I could have hoped: my dad did some terrible things, but it’s also pretty clear he loved me, and that matters most. He’s probably dead, but I’d mostly assumed that already. My mother did many terrible things to me—keeping me in the dark the least of them—but at least now there’s a slight reason for the way she hated me. She had a baby to save a marriage that wasn’t especially good in the first place, and that baby ended up looking very much like the daughter his mistress had had two weeks prior. And then those girls met in kindergarten and became best friends, running all over town telling everyone they were twins.

I wonder how many goddamn people in Elliott Springs suspected the truth.

“Are you going to talk to your mom about it?” he asks.

My jaw grinds. My mother knew a great deal of the shit that was happening at school and she never said a word to me. She allowed me to believe I was the problem when she should have told me why it was happening and placed me somewhere away from Bradley at the very least. I mean, it probably had almost nothing to do with my weight at all. I’ll never forgive her for letting me believe it was, but I was already never going to forgive her before all this came to light. “I’m not sure there’s much of a point. She’ll just spend the whole conversation finding a way to blame me for how things went down and defending her bad decisions.”

“What about Bradley?”

Ugh. That’s more complicated. Looking back, I can see how every one of my successes must have needled her. My grades, my placement test scores, the schools I got into. Academically, I did better and better while she started to slide precipitously from age ten onward. I was winning awards; I was valedictorian. I’m guessing she blamed it entirely on the fact that we were living off money that should have been partly hers.

But could any of that make up for the way she tortured me?

“Between the shit she did and the shit my mother said, they pretty much broke me,” I finally reply. “No matter what her life was like after my dad left, I don’t see myself letting it go.”

“Did you know that lead becomes two hundred times stronger under pressure?” he asks out of nowhere.

I frown. “You’re incredibly bad at changing the subject.”

He pulls the knife from my hands and turns me toward the mirror. “I’m not changing the subject. I’m telling you to look at yourself and realize that no one broke you. You’re one of the strongest people I know, and a lot of that is because of what you went through. How much of yourself would you give away to have not gone through it all?”

I sigh. “A lot. I’d give away a lot.”

“I know. I’m working on that.” He presses a kiss to the top of my head and wraps his arms around me, still holding my gaze in the mirror. “Because I wouldn’t want you to give away a single goddamn thing.”

* * *

I don’t talk to Bradley. I don’t talk to my mom. I’m finishing up the last few contracts on Main Street and finalizing my presentation for the Lucas Hall hearing next week, and I’m busy.

When Liam points out that I’m not too busy to take Snowflake on long walks, cook dinner with him, and have sex…I tell him I’m thinking I’ll cut back on all those things too.

That shuts him right up.

“Come on, Em,” he groans, two nights before the hearing on Lucas Hall. “You’ve done enough.”

“No, I haven’t. And neither have you. Don’t you want to work on it a little?”

“Nope,” he says, kicking back on the couch, “and yours is fine too. Come watch something with me.”

“Mine isn’t fine and neither is yours. Liam…you’ve got to do something. At least show them the history of the building. Remind them what they’re giving up.”

He hitches a shoulder. “There’s no point. Face it, Em. You’ve won.”

I slap a hand to my forehead. “Since when are you such a quitter? I haven’t won. There are a million things you could do. You’re just not doing them.”

His smile is gentle. “Em, I’m not a quitter. I’m a realist. And what I want most right now is to enjoy these last nights with you because I don’t know how many more of them I’m going to get.”

Something flips over in my stomach—a grief so intense I feel sick from it. What will I have left when this is done? I’ll have everything I thought I wanted, and nothing I actually want.

I close my laptop and sit by his side.

“You could stop me, you know.” I stare straight ahead at the television, seeing nothing. “Easily. All you have to do is get it designated as a historic landmark.”

“I doubt there’s time for that at this point.” He reaches for the remote. “Okay, so there’s this movie about a female vigilante who—”

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