Page 97 of An Academy for Liars

“She’s suffocating.”

“Let her.”

Lennon, looking up, her face screwed with pain, saw that Dante had come to stand behind Eileen’s chair. He braced his hands on her shoulders, hunched over slightly, his figure backlit by the lamp. He lowered his lips to Eileen’s ear. Said something that Lennon couldn’t hear. But whatever it was made Eileen stiffen in her chair, her hold on Lennon slackening, then releasing completely. Lennon, gasping and trembling with pain, cowered on the floor.

Eileen stood then and stepped over Lennon as she made for the bedroom door. “I look forward to seeing you at the start of our next semester.”

When Eileen wasgone, Dante helped Lennon off the floor and downstairs. Lennon caught a glimpse of his son—emerging from the dark of the foyer—and blacked out. She came to minutes later, strapped into the passenger seat of Dante’s car. It was dark, and they were driving through the thickly forested back roads that snaked along the coast.

“How did it start between you two?” she asked in a small voice.

Dante’s hands tightened, bloodless, around the steering wheel. “You should rest.”

“No,” said Lennon. “None of that. Don’t patronize me. I want the truth. Why didn’t you tell me you had a child?”

“I intended to…when the time was right.”

Lennon couldn’t tell if that was a lie. She was beginning to question whether she’d ever been able to tell. If any of her reads on him were reliable. If she even knew the man sitting next to her at all. “How did it start between you two?”

“Do you really want to—”

“Yes,” said Lennon, cutting him off. “How did it start?”

“Same way it started with us. Only I was the student, she the advisor.”

So this was the real source of his reluctance. Lennon had sensed it was something more than the usual trepidation but had not put the pieces together until now. Dante himself had been in a relationship like this one, and if his tortured expression was any indication at all, he’d suffered for it.

Lennon didn’t want to ask the question that followed. But some dark suspicion prompted her to ask it anyway. “How old were you when it first began?”

“Lennon—”

“How old, Dante?” Lennon said this gently, afraid that she might wound him.

“I was turning sixteen.”

“So you were fifteen?” Jesus Christ, she thought, he was a baby. Just a child himself. Younger even than the son he had now, by the looks of it. The idea of it filled her with revulsion and rage on his behalf.

Lennon didn’t want to ask the question that came next. A part of her felt like she had no place to. But she had to know—after seeing them together, the way Dante had held Eileen’s shoulders—she had to have an answer, even if it broke her to bits. “Are you…still with her?”

“Lennon, you have to understand—”

“Just answer the question,” she said, her voice breaking a little with the effort of both trying to be gentle and holding back her tears. “I need to know. When was the last time you were, you know, together?”

A muscle in Dante’s jaw jumped and spasmed. “Six months ago.”

“So since you’ve known me?”

“Yes.”

Lennon felt like she might fall through the floor of the car. “Do you love her?”

“She’s the mother of my son.”

A gaping silence opened like a wound between them.

“Are you going to…keep being with her?”

He kept his eyes on the road. “I don’t want to. I haven’t wanted to since you and I…began. Maybe since before that, even.”

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