She didn’t tell. Telling was the opposite of helpful. Telling wouldn’t help him at all. If she told, there would be problems for him, and she wouldn’t be able to help him anymore. They wouldn’t let her be his friend.
Besides, he said he was sorry. He didn’t mean it. He loved her.
He told her that over and over. I love you, Vicky.
I just want to hold you.
Holding wasn’t bad. Hugging wasn’t bad. She believed him when he said he loved her. It was okay.
Until it wasn’t.
Until he was saying, “Shh, shh,” in her ear as he used his body to pin hers down. He wasn’t hurting her, but he wasn’t letting her get away either. She was whimpering, “Please, please, please,” like water coming to boil until she was frenzied. But it all happened so quickly. And he was so soothing. And she ached, but his touch was so gentle. He petted her hair and her face.
“You’re so good. So pretty. And I love you,” he’d said as he cuddled her. “I love you, Vicky.”
Tori hadn’t said anything. She just lay there quietly crying, wondering how much trouble she would be in if anyone found out. Her thoughts were thick and slow. Not very many of them made sense.
The thing was Zachary truly meant what he said. He thought he loved Tori. For most of his life, a man, his father, had come into his room at night and held him close just the way he held her. He’d cuddled him and kissed his hair and touched him, all the while telling him the exact same thing. “You’re so good, Zach. So precious. So pretty. And I love you.”
Zachary never meant to hurt her. He was just expressing his emotion the only way he knew how.
The aftermath was a whirlwind. Zachary was taken away, and Tori was angry and confused. She got mixed up as to whom she was supposed to be yelling at. They moved her to what her new social worker, Shane, called a therapeutic foster home. There was only one other girl there—a girl whose stepfather had let his friends use her as they pleased one night. Tori was especially pissed off because Shane was a stupid asshole for putting her in the same league as that girl.
Shanna and Greta Wood were the couple, her foster parents, during that time.
But eventually, Tori figured out how to play the game. She shared at group, and told the therapists what they wanted to hear. She curbed her aggressive manner so she would be allowed to play with the regular fucked-up kids.
After that, she spent two years with Justin and Tina Davis, a clueless pair if ever she’d met one, before she got into one too many shouting matches with them. They seven-dayed her, and she ended up with the Everetts.
Ani’s home was the ninth place Tori had lived in her eighteen years of life. She’d had fifteen mothers and fathers, countless siblings. Some of them had been nice. Some of them had been mean. Some of them had been apathetic. Some of them had gone overboard trying to fix her.
Long after she’d run out of words, Tori sat still and stared forward as though she were oblivious to the silence that engulfed them both.
It seemed to take years before Ani could breathe again. She remembered this feeling only too well. When she’d woken up in the hospital with her inconsolable mother-in-law by her side, when she knew the horrible image of her husband and daughter and the pool of blood spreading beneath them was no nightmare, she’d felt exactly like this—like the air was thick with fire and smoke. Breathing hurt. There was a weight she wore like an airtight vest around her shoulders and across her chest. She couldn’t see it but it squeezed until she wasn’t sure how she could fill her lungs through what little space was left.
Tori, her pain-in-the-ass, ornery, fiery little sister, seemed drained of life. She sat across from Ani, silent and still, her features slack, the light in her eyes dimmed.
“Tori,” Ani said on a breath. “I’m—”
“Don’t.” The word was lifeless. “You wanted to know, and I told you. I don’t want to hear you’re sorry. You aren’t sorry. If you were so concerned with me, you would have taken care of me yourself.”
Ani winced. It felt as though her heart had dropped right down into her stomach, and the quick rhythm it beat only made her insides twist more. Nausea roiled in her stomach, and she had to swallow several times to assure herself she wasn’t going to throw up. “I don’t understand.” Her voice was raw. “I didn’t know. I thought you were safe where you were. That’s the point of that system, isn’t it? They take other kids away from situations where they aren’t safe.”
Her sister scoffed. “Would you grow up? When the people who bring you into the world don’t love you or aren’t around to love you, why should anyone else give a fuck?” She looked up, her movements slow, and when her eyes met Ani’s she’d aged. Even the soft lines of her face looked tired. “There’s a lot of bullshit. A lot. What that boy did . . . it was nothing.”
Ani stared. “I don’t understand how you could say that. It wasn’t nothing.”
“It was nothing.” Tori’s tone gained a hint of life again. “I’m fine. You know what happened to Zach? Do you know what his life looked like after he did that?” She shook her head. “It wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t his fault he acted that way.”
There was so much Ani wanted to say, she couldn’t say anything. She opened her mouth to argue, but no sound came out. She closed her mouth again, opened, closed.
Then, all at once, she slumped, her hands over her eyes as the roiling emotion in her overflowed. She hid her tears as she tried to breathe, and when she wiped them away, she felt calmer.
“Why do you do that?” she asked, her voice soft and sad. “Why can you forgive a boy who hurt you like that, but you can’t forgive me?”
One, two, three long beats passed. Ani blew out a long breath and rubbed her temples, trying to think around the crippling regret and frustration she felt.
“The baby,” she said when Tori didn’t answer her question. The words were clipped, tight. She wasn’t sure she could stand to hear another horrible story. “You said you’d tell me about the baby.”
Tori pressed her lips together, for the first time showing some kind of trepidation in the set of her shoulders and the tense way she held her body. Ani’s stomach twisted and her thoughts reeled. She steeled herself for the worst.
“I said yes that time,” Tori mumbled. “It was stupid, but it was my fault.”
The tenor of her words was clear. There was nothing else to say; the matter was closed.
Too tired to fight, Ani moved on. “Fine. What do you want to know?” She just wanted this night over with.
For once, Tori must have been on the same page, because she pushed her chair back. “Look, I have homework to do. Can we do this tomorrow or whatever?”
Ani nodded. “Yeah. Whenever you want.”
“And you’re really going to sell the house?” Tori fixed her with a stare, like she was expecting Ani to be full of shit after all.
“I said I would.”
Tori searched her. She must have been somewhat assured by whatever she saw because she didn’t argue.
“It takes time,” Ani said.
“Duh.”
Without another word, Tori walked out of the kitchen.
For long minutes, Ani stayed at the table swirling the last drop of wine around and around in her glass. She stared at the deep red drop and tried to think of nothing at all. She didn’t want to let all the things she knew, everything her sister had told her and everything she’d read between the lines, settle into her psyche. She didn’t want to let those thoughts become a concrete part of her.
There was nothing more maddening than the violent need to turn back time, to right irrevocable wrongs. Sitting still at the table, she writhed in her skin, feeling like she would fly to pieces because she just couldn’t accept this world could be real.
This wasn’t life. This was hell.
For all these months since Jett and Mara died, she’d been trying not to acknowledge the truth she was facing now. Every day since
then, she’d put one foot in front of the other. She made all the necessary plans, dotted the i’s, crossed the t’s. She’d returned to work and done what was expected of her. She’d tried to move on. She’d tried not to dwell.
But what an impossible task that turned out to be. The instant her husband and daughter died, she’d been relocated to some alternate universe. All she knew, day after day, was brimstone and hellfire. Anything that had given her joy before was gone. She had no family. She couldn’t bear to spend time with her friends. Her work gave her no satisfaction. There was nowhere she felt at ease.
For a crazy moment, she wondered if she had died that day. What if she had died and this really was hell?
Ani had never put much stock in the existence of hell. It seemed to her a ridiculous notion born of the need to believe that grievous wrongs were punished in the afterlife as they couldn’t always be in life. Eternity was a long time to suffer, and no part of her believed any being should suffer that long, no matter what they’d done.
But after hearing Tori’s story, understanding the life she had doomed her innocent baby sister to, Ani wondered if all those myths were true. It was easy to believe this was her punishment. It seemed fitting retribution, after all. She’d left Tori to a system that had beaten her down, warped her for good, and mangled her soul. It was fitting that Ani had touched heaven, known complete happiness, and lost it all at the hands of another abused soul. If there was some otherworldly entity thinking up tortures and methods of unrelenting pain, surely there could be no agony greater than what Ani felt living every day with the ghosts of the happy life she’d lost.
Slumping forward, Ani rested her elbows on the table and hung her head in her hands as the tears took her. She scrambled for some measure of control, tried to rein in her swirling emotions, but she was too far gone. All these months, when the incredible pain threatened, she told herself to breathe. Just breathe. It would be better. That was what everyone said. That was the bottom line. Everything got better with time and perspective.
After all, she’d lost everything once before. When her parents died, her entire world had changed forever. But she had kept her head up, moved forward, and hadn’t let grief have her, and she hadn’t let anything get in the way of the life she wanted.
She’d earned her heaven. She’d earned her impressive happiness.
She’d earned her heaven at the cost of shoving Tori into hell.
And maybe now, it was Ani’s turn to burn.
Chapter 14: Sweet and Sour
For days after her conversation with Tori, Ani hadn’t been able to think straight.
She was aware she was in a restaurant, surrounded by people. She’d answered the host when he asked how many were in her party—just her. She’d jumped all three times the waitress came over to see how she was doing. At the other tables, voices roared. She should have been hearing the typical restaurant background noise, indistinct conversation and vague laughter, but she wasn’t.
In Ani’s head, it was white noise.
“Hey, stranger.”
Startled, Ani looked up. It took her a few seconds to process that West had taken the seat opposite her. His smile was warm—a spot of heat where her soul had gone ice cold. “Hey.” The single word sounded as barely there as her thoughts.
“Are you meeting my brother here?”
Ani cocked her head, considering this for a minute before she realized there was nothing to think about. “I, um . . . no.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
She struggled to remember how to smile. “I hear you have good cheesecake.”
That made West grin, but before he could continue in that vein, Ani spoke again. “You know what I was thinking?” she asked, the words an awkward lurch.
“You were thinking we should try both the red velvet cheesecake and the banana cream cheesecake. Half pie, half cake, all delicious. Zoe.” He caught the attention of the waitress and ordered before he turned back to Ani. “But besides that, what else were you thinking?”
“There are a lot of Greek names. Beautiful Greek names. Persephone, Alexandra.”
Though she was babbling nonsense, West didn’t bat an eyelash. “I always thought Athena was pretty.”
“Athena isn’t bad. So why Antigone? Of all the gorgeous Greek names, why Antigone? That’s my name, by the way. My full name.”
West nodded as he considered her words. “I was named after a hotel. The hotel where I was conceived, in fact.”
Ani had taken a sip of tea. It was a mistake. She choked, spattering tea over her lips as she coughed. There was a smile playing about West’s mouth as he handed over a napkin.
Ani stumbled when she’d caught her breath again. Even if her brain hadn’t been stuck on stupid, she wouldn’t have been quite sure what to say to his admission. “That’s . . .”
“Exactly,” West said with a nod. He cocked his head, his eyes flitted down to where she was patting her collarbone dry, but he looked back up quickly.
Before Ani could react, Zoe returned with their desserts. It gave her a chance to recoup. West’s lighthearted banter was doing wonders to clear the cobwebs from her mind, but she wasn’t there yet.
“Now, are you more a cake person or a pie person?” West asked.
“Cake.” Before he could tell her all about the red velvet cheesecake, she said, “I really don’t know a non-awkward way to say this. And I seem to be missing my filter today. I really don’t mean this as anything more than curiosity.”
West looked wary. “Okay.”
“Before, um . . .” Before you found out my husband died. “Before. With the cheesecakes. You were flirting with me, weren’t you?”
His cheek twitched, and his face flushed. “I, um. Yeah. Yeah, I was.”
Ani stared down at the table. She’d been thinking about this off and on since the hospital when Shane confirmed his brother was attracted to her. “Why?”
He wrinkled his nose and folded his hands in front of him on the table. “Have you ever had this experience? There are some people who, even though you may have just met, it’s like you’ve known them all your life.”
Thinking it over, Ani nodded, wondering what he was getting at.
“There’s a theory I read somewhere that the reason this happens is because of reincarnation. Most of us have lived before, and our souls, if we knew each other in one of those lives, recognize one another. That’s why there’s an instant connection.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Are you trying to say we were together in a past life?”
His grin was devilish. “A past life? Why, Ms. Novak, what an absurd idea.” When she smiled, he looked pleased. “It’s an interesting theory,” he said with a shrug of his shoulders. “But it doesn’t matter. Can we try for friends?”
Ani turned the word friends over in her head. There was a subtle ache in her heart, a longing she hadn’t acknowledged. She’d been very lonely for a long time. It was her own fault, she’d pushed all her friends away, but it had been so long since she’d had anyone to talk to.
She pressed her lips together and swallowed down the lump in her throat. Her thoughts shifted again, and she couldn’t articulate a simple that would be nice.
“Do you know what I find strange?” she said instead.
He arched an eyebrow.
“Every time there’s a natural disaster, people start talking like it’s the beginning of the Apocalypse,” she said. The look on his face was slightly bemused, but he nodded that she should continue. “Every single time, a significant portion of people are so shocked. As if the earth doesn’t move every day, fires don’t spark up, water doesn’t flood.
“Really, I think people don’t like to be faced with the fact they have no control.” She’d begun wringing her hands at some point, and she stared off to the side as she prattled on. “There’s a natural order to the world. There have always been earthquakes and forest fires. People have always . . .” H
er breath stuttered, and it was difficult to go on. “People have always died. There are murders every day. Children get hurt.”
When it was obvious, even in her frazzled state, that the silence between them had gone on too long, Ani raised her head. West was studying her with a pinched look on his face. “Just because it’s always happened, does that mean it’s not a bad thing?” The question was not an accusation but a gentle prompt.
“That’s not what I said.” To her own ears, Ani’s voice was sharp. There was a warning there, and she was panicked he wouldn’t realize it. She’d opened a door she wasn’t ready to go through yet, and if he tried to push her, she didn’t know how she’d react.
After a few long moments, West cleared his throat. “You said you’re more a cake person than pie, right?”
Ani chanced a look at him. His smile was soft, his body language open. There wasn’t a hint of pity on his features. She took a deep breath. “Right.”
“Just one bite of this, then.” He nudged the plate of red velvet cheesecake in front of her. “The cake is so moist, the frosting so rich, you’ll love it.” He tilted his head at her, his tone conspiratorial. “You’ll hardly notice the horrible underlying cheesecake flavor,” he said with a wink.
Whatever had a stranglehold on her neck loosened, and for the first time in some days, Ani felt a hint of lightness at the center of her chest. She reached for her fork and brought a piece of cheesecake to her lips.
As she tasted the dessert, he watched her, eager for her reaction. It made her want to like the cheesecake. And really, when she rolled the sweetness around her tongue, it was delicious. “Not bad.” She tried to smirk.
If her grin looked as twisted and worn as she felt, West didn’t let on. He took a big bite of the other slice and sighed with pleasure. Brandishing his fork, he pointed at her. “We’ll find a cheesecake you like, and every time you come in here, you won’t be able to stop yourself from ordering a slice.”
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