I was twelve, and he was fourteen, and we were all that was left. Just me and my brother.
“They told me you won’t speak,” he said. I nodded, wiped my soggy eyes with my fists. “Why not?”
I shrugged. The moment I woke up in the yard, I’d been bombarded with questions. Does it hurt anywhere? Do you know where you are? What’s your name, honey? And it all came back to the same question, repeated over and over by everyone who came to see me: What happened?
“Because I don’t know,” I said, and my voice cracked. “I don’t know what caused the fire.”
He patted the side of his bed and made space for me to sit on the narrow mattress. “Listen to me, kid,” he said. His voice was barely above a whisper, so I knew he was about to tell me something important. “I messed up. I—” He started to cry, which only made me more upset.
He told me that he’d been on a website that taught him how to take apart an old microwave and use the wires to burn patterns onto blocks of wood. From childhood, he’d had an engineer’s mind. Our parents were always finding old electronics at yard sales and on eBay for him to disassemble.
Something went wrong. It sparked and he panicked, and the fire got out of control. He didn’t know how to put it out.
“I’m going to tell them,” he said. “It’s my fault Mom and Dad are gone.”
I begged him not to. They would send him to jail. He was older than me, and I knew enough to recognize that this made a difference. I imagined him being handcuffed and thrown into a jail cell, and it made me so hysterical that I couldn’t breathe. Nothing he said could calm me, until finally he said, “All right. All right, Margaux. I’ll tell them I don’t know what happened.”
For a small window of time, I believed it could really be that simple. But, of course, it wasn’t.
When I woke up choking on smoke, I stumbled across the living room and tried to make it to the front door before I was overtaken by it. And the bottle of lighter fluid that spilled onto the carpet when I crashed into the coffee table, that splashed onto the couch and the wall behind it—that was bad luck. Something that had been left out after my father refilled his Zippo lighter to entertain his one vice, his evening cigar.
After helping me out of the house, Jeremy ran to a neighbor’s house to call for help. But because he’d helped me, he smelled of the lighter fluid, too, and it was suspicious that he’d waited so long to go for help. The house was destroyed by the time he made it back to me, but he still went in to try and save them. I was screaming. I begged him not to.
When I realized they thought I did it, I didn’t correct them. I didn’t think it would matter, so long as Jeremy and I still had each other. He was older than me, and I knew he would go to prison for it if they suspected him. All I got was court-mandated therapy and a miserable adolescence.
Nothing came of the trial. My court-appointed attorney was worth his salt. He was able to raise enough reasonabledoubt that the jury couldn’t prove itwasn’tan accident, despite all the lighter fluid. My brother and I both received our share of our inheritance and our parents’ life insurance policy when we turned eighteen.
In the end, they separated us anyway. Our grandparents didn’t want him to be burdened by his disturbed little sister, and they sent him to the best boarding school money could buy.
I got saddled with a therapist who thought I was a criminal, and I barely spoke for months. But my brother wrestled with the guilt of what he’d done in a silence of his own. By adulthood, he couldn’t maintain it. He abandoned every opportunity that came his way, and when he abandoned all the scholarship opportunities his brilliance afforded, I was the only one who understood why.
When the ambulance comes for me this time, I feel myself freezing up. Something within me insists that the words I say won’t matter. I won’t be believed.
But then Waylen falls beside me after Elodie emerges from the parking garage like the badass hero in a 007 movie. She sees my bewildered expression and gives me a breathless smile. “You always underestimated me,” she says. “Admit it. Just because I embezzled a little money from a leggings company.”
She falls into an exhausted heap on the gravel beside me. I work Waylen’s head into my lap. “Don’t you dare die on me,” I tell him.
He responds with a hazy smile. “And make it easy on you?”
Ambulances wail in the distance, and I know that they’re coming for us. Elodie pats my hand. Her hair is in disarray, and soot stains her cheeks and rumpled clothes.But it’s the warmth of her expression that throws me. I’ve never seen this side of her before. Though I suppose she can say the same for me.
“How did you know where I was?” I ask.
She gives me a playful wink, despite everything. As the sirens grow louder, it offers a bizarre sense of reassurance. Some things never change. “While you were researching Bertram, I was researching you,” she says. “Since, you know, you refuse totellme anything. And once I figured out your past, it wasn’t hard to figure out that Mr. X must be your brother. So I’ve been in touch with him at the hospital. Wasn’t hard to find him there once I had a name.”
“For how long?” I ask.
“Since the police came to my door accusing you of murder. You’re a lot of things, but you’re no killer. Just serially late to drop-offs and pickups.”
She still hasn’t answered my question. She was able to hunt down news of my past—something only a person with talents noticeable by Mr. X could pull off. But how did she find me here?
The ambulances are here now, and they’re ushering Waylen onto a stretcher. He’s grasping my hand. “Don’t leave me,” he says.
I know he’s referring to more than just this moment. He means the years of turmoil between us. I let him hold on to me, and I stay beside him in the ambulance. “I’ll stay if you will,” I tell him.
Twenty-Six
There was only one wrench in Annie’s plan: me.
