Page 119 of An Academy for Liars

The next day, she rallied her strength and tried again.

This time, she went to a balmy Tuesday in the fifth summer of Dante’s childhood. It was, by all accounts, a rather unremarkable summer, as summers went. Lennon stepped off the elevator and onto a wet street in Brooklyn. Children—their faces blurs of joy—ran barefoot and shrieking through an arc of water that spit from an open fire hydrant. The fat summer sun limned the mist, casting the whole scene in a bright and bleary sepia.

Across the street, there was a man sitting on a park bench. So little of who Lennon knew to be Dante was present in this hunched, gaunt figure, with the smile and the bleeding nose. But when their eyes met from across the street, she saw familiarity spark to life in his sunken eyes, like a firefly trapped in a jar.

Lennon crossed the street and went to him. She saw that there was a small brown moth clinging to his cheek. It was a tiny little thingwith wrinkled wings, and as Lennon sat down on the bench beside him, it took flight, fluttering about the shell of his ear.

“Took you long enough,” he said. Lennon noticed that his legs, broken the last time she’d seen him, had somehow been reset. A feat of persuasion, perhaps, and a painful one at that.

“I came as soon as I could,” she said. “You didn’t make it easy for me.”

In the street, two brave little girls ran hand in hand through the water, so close to the hydrant’s outlet that they were very nearly blasted off their feet.

“Are those your sisters?”

He nodded. “Beth and Eliza.”

“Which one are you?” Lennon asked, nodding to the children. Any one of the boys could have been a young Dante—at that age it was hard to tell, and their faces were blurred so badly by the water and the golden light of the setting sun that even when she squinted, she couldn’t quite bring them into focus.

Dante pointed to a window, three stories up, in one of the apartment complexes down the street. There was a small face pressed to the glass.

“Why aren’t you playing with the other kids?”

“I was grounded.”

“What’d you do?”

“I don’t remember now,” he said. “But I know I didn’t really mind. It was enough just watching them.” Here, his gaze returned to his sisters. “How are things at the school?”

“Things have changed. The gates held. I sent Eileen on her way.”

“And the chancellorship?”

“It’s mine now.”

He nodded. A small smile touched his lips, and when it did, fresh blood streamed from his nose and spattered the concrete.

“Why didn’t you tell me you planned to save my life?” Lennon asked. It was a question that had haunted her since the night she’d lost him. “You let me hate you. You let me think you’d betrayed me—”

“You would’ve stopped me,” he said. “There was no other way.”

“I didn’t get the chance to say goodbye.”

“This is that chance,” he said.

“Well, I didn’t come here to say goodbye, Dante. I came here to take you home.”

Dante chose his next words very carefully. She could tell by the furrow that formed between his brows, the same expression he made in the classroom when someone asked a particularly difficult question. “I’m tired, Lennon.”

“I know you are. But you can rest back in the present, where you belong.”

Dante considered this for a beat. Silent.

Lennon tried to keep her voice level. “You don’t want to come home, do you?”

“I haven’t decided,” he said.

“And that’s what you’re doing here? Deciding?”

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