Sometime the next afternoon, my parents left to get some food. Jake was feeling good, and he’d convinced Casey to go home and get a good night’s sleep before an exam she had the next morning. After she left was the first time we’d been alone.
“You want to talk?” Jake asked.
“About what?”
“I think you know.”
“Are you seriously telling me that you heard what I was saying… in a coma?”
“I don’t think I was in it anymore. I’m pretty sure I woke up a few days before I actually opened my eyes. I don’t know what happened, Kyle. All I can say is that I heard a lot of stuff. Some things I don’t remember, other things are fuzzy, but some of it is clear,” he said in a knowing way, making me understand that my midnight rant had been one of those things.
“Okay, so in my defense, you need to know I wasn’t blaming you. I was just angry and frustrated.”
“I know. I’m not mad. Your anger is justified. We should have talked about it,” he sighed, shaking his head. “My silence… it was never meant to punish you. I didn’t even know you felt that way. There’s just too much I’m holding onto, and I have to let it go or I’m never going to have a stable life. I need to go back into therapy, and I think you do too.”
“You think?” I blurted out, with a crazy look on my face. We both laughed. Damn, we were a pitiful pair.
“I guess what you need to know is that it wasn’t your fault,” Jake said.
I looked down at my hands, which instantly began to shake. Were we really going to do this?
“I should have told you sooner. What happened that day… it wasn’t random. He’d been following me. If it hadn’t happened at the business park, it would have happened on the way home from school or somewhere else.”
“You don’t know that,” I replied, unconvinced.
“Oh, trust me, I know that.”
“How?” I asked, desperation clear in my voice. Jake didn’t respond right away.Please. Please. Tell me how you know that.
“Remember when we went to the mall a couple days before the kidnapping, and Toby took a swim in the fountain?”
I nodded. “I actually pushed him in.”
“I know,” he grinned. “Anyway, Ray was there. He followed us home, and my fate was sealed. So stop giving yourself so much damn credit. You had nothing to do with it.”
“How do you know that?”
“How do you think I know that? He told me.”
I wasn’t sure how to respond or how to feel about his admission, but if it were true, it would absolve me of so much guilt.
“Did you talk a lot… to him?”
Jake shrugged. “He talked. I listened. I didn’t have much of a choice since I was a captive audience.”
“Did he ever say anything about me?”
Jake looked away. I waited, hoping his confessions would keep coming. And they did.
“You were never supposed to live. He was furious that you did.”
The expression on Jake’s face told me that he’d paid the price for my escape.
“Why did you tell me to run?”
“I didn’t know if he was trying to terrify me or what, but while he was cuffing me, Ray whispered in my ear that I’d better say goodbye because he was about to blow a hole through the back of your head. I wasn’t being brave, Kyle. I wasn’t acting the hero and sacrificing my life so you could live. You were seconds away from being shot dead.”
I sat there in stunned disbelief. My hands were white from gripping the side rails on his bed.
