Page 42 of Everyone Is Lying to You

“Don’t be dramatic. I need to think.”

“I swear to you it will never happen again.”

“No, it won’t.” I opened my eyes as wide as I could and set my lips in a stern line, despite the fact that it nearly killed me to do both of those things. When I fell the night before…no…when he threw me on the ground the night before…the inside of my lip had snagged on a tooth. It had left a nasty gash in my mouth and the tooth was loose. I knew it would fall out.

“I don’t know what I’m going to decide. It will probably be that I never want to see you ever again.” I so wanted him to believe that was a possibility. “But I can’t make up my mind right now. I have to sleep. Maybe for an entire day, maybe for five. And that means I need you to do three things for me. I need you to call the shop and tell them I won’t be in. Tell them I’m sick. Sound convincing. Then I need you to get me the strongest painkillers you can. I don’t want Advil. I want Vicodin. I don’t care how you get it. And then I want you to leave. I want to sleep and I want to heal and I want to think. Can you do those things?”

“I’ll do anything.”

“Also food. Something soft. Soup. Do all of that. Leave the pills outside the door and knock when you have them and then go away.”

It was the most assertive I’d ever been with him.

“I love you,” he said then. He’d never said it before. No man had ever said it to me. In fact my own mother had never said it to me. The effect those words had on me was like nothing else. Maybe it was years of culture telling women that it was the ultimate form of validation, the most important thing for a young girl to strive for. Those three little words shattered me. Gray gave me an expectant look. He was a man unused to waiting for anything. And so that was the one thing I could do. I could make him wait.

“Leave,” I repeated.

“It will never happen again, Rebecca.” He had never called me Bex, which Lizzie called me, or Becky, which was what my mom had always called me. Not once had he used any of my nicknames and I always thought that was romantic. Now I know it was about control. He wanted to rename me himself. Naming something gave you power over it.

“No, it won’t,” I said, and closed my eyes. “You will never lay a hand on me like that again. And if you do I won’t just break up with you. Grayson. Look at me.” He cringed when our eyes met and he was forced to take in the extent of the damage he’d done to my face, a face that he had told me was how he imagined the first angels must have looked.

“If you ever hurt me again you will be digging yourself an early grave. Do you hear me?”

He swallowed hard and nodded before leaning down to kiss me on the forehead, then walked out of the room.

An hour later he brought me everything I asked for.

And you know by now that I didn’t leave him. You can judge me for that all you want. I’ve already judged myself plenty. Butwhen you’ve been raised like I was, without real love or affection, without any kind of safety net. When you were raised without hope for any kind of future and then all of a sudden something so much bigger and brighter seems within reach, you keep reaching. Or at least that’s what I told myself. I also believed that I was a magnet for bad behavior, that maybe I deserved it because there was something deeply wrong with me. I’d been a curse for my mother. She’d never let me forget it.

Gray didn’t hurt me again for a long time. At least not physically. He found other ways to destroy me over the years, but that was the last time he laid a hand on me until recently.

But he was much more devious and evil than I could ever imagine. Months ago, I discovered the one secret he desperately wanted to keep from me. And when I confronted him with what I’d found out, what he did was worse than that night he locked me in the closet, way worse.

I kept my promise. He did end up in an early grave.

Chapter Twelve

Lizzie

Idream about being back in college. It’s a dream I have a lot, a few different variations of it. The buildings are always vaguely similar to the ones I spent four years in: Some are gray-stone imitations of European castles, others modern towers of glass donated by masters of the current universe. Even though I know this place, I never have any idea where I’m supposed to go or which classes I should be in. I’m aware that finals are coming soon and that I’ve never been to a single class. I know I will fail. Sweat pours down the back of my neck and tears sting my eyes. An intense dread settles into my stomach as I curse myself for being so careless. In my unconscious state I’m begging the registrar for a copy of my class schedule or I’m hunting down the one faceless classmate who I know has excellent notes for Victorian lit. My real friends and former boyfriends are rarely there, or if they are it’s a cameo. They wave across the quad or smile at me in the hallway and then disappear. But in this dream I see Bex as I’m coming out of the registrar’s office. My schedule is in my hand, but I can’t read it. The words are blurry. In the dream she’s a mixture of Rebecca and Bex. Her hairis long and blond and loose around her shoulders like it is today, but she’s wearing ripped jeans that ride low on her hips and bare her perfectly toned belly, complete with a turquoise belly button ring, the same one I used to have after we pierced our belly buttons together at a place called Hole Lotta Fun. She’s got on the purple halter top we bought at a street fair during spring break in Myrtle Beach, the one with shimmering beads and sequins that wink at me in the bright morning sun. Despite the hour, she’s ready for a night out, a damn good time, and she reaches her hand out to me.

I shake my head. It’s too early. I have to get to class. I have to find those notes. I have to study and pass the tests and get the degree and then the job and climb the ladder. I mumble all of this and she smiles ruefully at me.

“None of it really matters, Lizzie.” Her voice echoes like it’s coming out of an old radio speaker. She reaches out her hand again and I turn away.

As I walk across the quad, I hear her start to follow me, but I don’t turn around. And then there’s a bloodcurdling scream, the kind of scream that turns your blood to ice. I turn and Bex is gone.

When I open my eyes and look around the bedroom that isn’t mine, it takes me a minute to orient myself in the beautiful suite in the middle of the desert, to remember that I did graduate from college, that I did so with honors. That I got a job that I loved in a city I never wanted to leave. That I got promoted and promoted again and that I got to do the kind of work that was meaningful and fulfilling.

Until I didn’t. Until the goalposts moved and everything I’d worked for meant essentially nothing.

None of it really matters.

***

The Sommers ranch is about ninety minutes from the resort, and as I drive out to it, I can’t help but imagine Bex on this same road driving home after she left my room just the other night. She had plenty of time. It would have taken her an hour and a half, maybe less, to get home, to find her husband, lure him out of his bed. Maybe she gave him something to drink with a sedative in it, because how could a woman as petite as Bex overpower a man who runs ultramarathons? But it’s possible she gave him some milk laced with Valium and then lured him into the garage and shoved him in front of the spikes of some plow type of thing, shoved him so that his skin peeled away and spilled his guts all over the floor. My stomach curdles at the image, bringing a stinging bile up the back of my throat.

I need to think. Assess. This drive is as good a place to do it as any. The landscape changes as I get farther and farther into the red canyons. Alien rock formations rise high above the shrubs and dust, striated towers of orange, pink, and purple. It’s beautiful and otherworldly, and I’m oddly calm even as I go through the gory details I know to be true and the possibilities that are playing out in my head.

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