Then he picked his buckets up and threw them in a fit of anger. They smashed against the building before hitting the ground and rolling every which way.
“Rory!” I yelled at him. “Stop! Get yourself under control now!”
Or elsewas the unspoken ultimatum. He stopped raging.
“Now get back over here and face the thing inside that scares you. If you tell me yours, I’ll tell you mine. I’ll tell you what I found when I dug deep, and the reason I stared at you the way I did the day we met.”
Panting, he turned to me, suddenly more curious than angry.
“Sit,” I demanded.
He slunk back over and dropped to the ground, crossing his legs as he faced me.
“Thank you,” I said, before adding, “Psycho.”
A smile, a real one, surfaced. “Sorry.”
I reached over and touched his face.
“No, I’m sorry, Rory. It was wrong of me to go behind your back.”
“You think?
“I asked Nikki because you wouldn’t trust me with the truth.”
Rory tapped his fingers on the sidewalk, his eyes blinking. I laid a hand on his to steady him, but he moved it away. “It’s not that I don’t trust you. You don’t understand the chunk carved out of me when I swore to tell the truth in court. To have to admit to things I’d buried long ago. I don’t tell you not because I don’t trust you, but because it physically hurts me to talk about it. After testifying… I wasn’t… I wasn’t sure I wanted to go on. I almost didn’t make it out of that period of my life. The medicine I take isn’t just for my anxiety and tics. It’s to keep me from doing what Nikki did. And now…”
I grabbed his hands in mine.
“It’s coming, Grace.”
He was rambling, and I was struggling to keep up with his train of thought. “What’s coming?”
“The end of me. And when it comes, it’ll take all of you down with me, no matter what I do to try and stop it. It’s why I came out here tonight. I can breathe. Safety in anonymity.”
“Is it Martin Lindell you’re afraid of?” I asked, assuming he was Rory’s Reindeer Man.
“I’m not afraid of him or his posse of pervs, Grace. I buried them so deep behind bars, they’re never getting out.”
“Then what?”
“The fame. The media interest. I feel like the virus has already been unleashed, and it’s now silently spreading. That’s what’s going to bury me.”
“It didn’t bury Jake. He knew what the infamy of his past would do to his fame. He chose this life.”
“Because what else was he going to do? His secret is wide open. Mine’s not.Yet.But it will be. It’s only a matter of time before explicit pictures of me as a kid are being whack-a-moled off the internet. Think about it. If Nikki was talking to you, who else was she sharing her story with? One oxy pill and I’m sure she was singing like a bird. And the worst… the worst of it.”
Rory struggled to get the words out. “After Nik died, I was lying in the bunk and trying to remember the good moments with her. And there were moments. She wasn’t all bad, you know? It wasn’t until we went our separate ways, and I was suddenly on my own in the system, that I realized how much she’d protected me. Let’s just say my fear of four walls happened after we were separated. Anyway, lying in my bunk after she died, I asked myself what the best thing she’d ever done for me was. And my answer? She died.”
Rory tipped his head back against the building and covered his eyes with his hands. “I can’t even cry for her, Grace. I’ve spent my whole life holding my breath, waiting for the next horrible thing to happen. And Nikki, whether she was directly responsible or not, was the link to my past that I feared. Would she betray me to Martin and his men? Would she leave me to testify alone? Would she sell me out to the media and blow up my life? Would she somehow turn you against me? She was the link to it all, and when I found out she was dead, I was flooded with relief. All I could think was it’s over. I'm finally free.”
“And that makes you feel guilty?”
“It makes me feel like a shitty person. Do you know I never picked up her ashes? Nikki’s sitting on a shelf somewhere all by herself, while I’m out there living my dream.”
“It’s not much of a dream if all you’re doing is waiting for it to implode at any minute.”
He nodded. “You see why the streets are looking better and better?”
