“He wanted money from me. I stole as much as I could from Lucas to give it to him, because Caleb threatened me. I gave him the last of the small amount I had myself, then I started selling things, pawning things from around the house that Lucas wouldn’t miss, but I was tapped out.”
“What do you meanthreatenedyou? How? Like threatening your life? What do you mean?”
“Sort of. He didn’t know he was threatening my life. I didn’t know it at the time either,” I say, knowing how evasive that sounds.
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“He threatened to tell Lucas that the baby I was pregnant with wasn’t his,” I say, so quietly I’m not sure I actually said it. I hear her sharp intake of breath and see her hand flutter to her lips.
“Oh, my God in heaven. Is that true?” She stands and paces a few steps, then stops and sits, then gets back up. She stares at me, waiting for something, and then points at Avery. “Is she...Caleb’s?” she asks, in a strange, high-pitched voice.
I want to scream and run out the door. I want to throw up. It’s all imploding, and I can’t escape the truth any longer. I nod.
“That’s how he was threatening my life. If Lucas found out that Avery wasn’t his baby, he’d kill me, but Caleb didn’t know that,” I say, and Cora sits down again. Her face crumples. I see her eyes well, and she shakes her head quickly and then nods and stands again. I don’t know what’s happening. She sits again. I feel dizzy with her anxious movements. She looks me in the eye.
“That’s Paige’s granddaughter,” she says in the same high-pitched, emotional squeak.
“She can’t know that,” I say, much louder than I mean to, and we both look at Avery, who, thankfully, doesn’t stir. Cora doesn’t rebut this right away. She regroups and tries to stay calm.
“I don’t understand. Why—What happened to Caleb? What did you do?”
“He thought I had money just because Lucas does. He wouldn’t believe me when I told him I couldn’t access it. He wanted more. I was just driving home that night. Lucas was out with Finn, having drinks or whatever, so I went out, too. Nothing interesting—I saw a movie—and then when I drove in, he was there. He flagged me down,” I say, and the memory of it steals my breath. I remember seeing him and feeling a longing: I wanted him to be clean. I hoped we’d sit on the swings and talk the way we used to. I just wanted him to be okay, to be stable, to be the person I could run away with. He was so amazing when he wasn’t high, but he was that night.
“I saw him there,” I say, “standing in the rain. He was crying, he was totally fucked up—higher than I’d ever seen him. I rolled down the window and asked if he was okay. He was angry. He was apologizing, saying he just wanted to talk, but when I realized the state he was in, I said I needed to get home. He demanded money. I said again that I didn’t have any. And that’s when he pulled a gun,” I say, and I start to shake.
Cora puts her hands on top of mine to steady them.
“The gun at the scene they never figured out. That was his?” she asks.
“I don’t know where he got it. It was untraceable, I read in the paper. No prints, probably because he was wearing gloves. It was winter, it was cold, and with the people he ran with, keeping his prints off an illegal gun was probably something he knew to do. They never figured out what the gun and the hit-and-run had to do with each other. It never made sense,” I say.
“But it never was a hit-and-run,” Cora says in stunned disbelief.
“He pointed it at me,” I say. “He even cocked it. He was high as a kite and ready to shoot. He wasn’t the real Caleb, he was the high-on-coke Caleb. He was screaming at me, demanding I give him money or he’d kill me. He’d been on a bender for a few days. He was out of his mind. Then—I couldn’t believe it—but he fired. He was so shaky and messed up, he missed by a mile, but then he cocked the gun again and used both hands to position it, aimed at me, so I just...” I can’t stop the wail creeping up my throat. “I just pushed on the gas!” I cry. “I thought about the baby. I knew he wasn’t himself, and he was ready to kill me. Cora, you have to believe that I did the only thing I could. There was no reasoning with him. There was nowhere to run. He had the gun cocked and pointed at my head. I never thought the impact would kill him. I was just trying to protect us. That’s all I’ve done since I’ve been in this fucking country—I was just trying to stay alive,” I say and then double over, sobbing.
I don’t know what to expect from her. If she hadn’t already had the shock of her life, now she has. She clasps her hands together in fists and rests her forehead on them. She stays that way for some time.
“I need to think,” she finally says, and without another word, without making eye contact or giving any indication of what she’s thinking and what she plans to do, she’s gone.
29
PAIGE
Paige stands in the dark kitchen with her mouth open, frozen, unable to speak. She’s holding a glass of water she never brought to her lips because when she came down to get it, she heard Cora’s voice coming through the baby monitor Nicola left on the kitchen island when Avery was napping upstairs earlier.
At first, she couldn’t put together why she was hearing Cora’s voice in the baby monitor, and she’d thought she was dreaming, but then she stood still and listened.
The words she was hearing didn’t fit together. The characters in the story Nicola was telling were all wrong. Finn hit Caleb, not Nicola. Caleb was the victim, not the villain. What was happening? Her first instinct was to run into Nicola’s room and lunge at her, pin her down and rip the flesh from her face with her fingernails and scream for Caleb until her chest burned and her eyes blurred and she was hoarse from his name in her mouth.
She can’t do that. Avery. Somewhere in between her rage and confusion, she tries to let the weight of that one detail settle in. Avery is Caleb’s. Her head swims. Caleb needed help, and she didn’t know. He was in trouble. He was a criminal? He wasn’t who she thought he was. The pain of this is unbearable, suffocating.
Nicola could have stopped all these months of agony and searching and not knowing, but...how could she? Can Paige blame Nicola, now that she knows what was happening to her? Yes, she decides, she can. She’s overwhelmed with anger. She needs someone to blame. Shehassomeone to blame. She’s not sure, though. Could Caleb have been that unhinged addict Nicola described? How could Paige have never known any of that? What kind of mother would be so blind to all of it?
She needs to sit, to breathe. She needs to think, but she is still frozen in shock with a glass of water vise-gripped in her hand and her eyes wide and unblinking. She thinks about Finn in jail and wonders how she could have gotten it so wrong. She thinks again about Caleb and how he wasn’t faultless. She’s drowning in thoughts that are coming too fast to process.
Her shock shifts into something else, a slow realization of the truth. The items in the room around her don’t look real. Her head feels light, and she feels like her knees will buckle from the sudden dizziness. Her hands quiver violently, and before she can put down her glass of water, she loses control of it, and it falls to the ground and shatters.
Nicola appears from the bedroom immediately to see what the crash was. Paige stares at her—the woman who killed her son.
