“Um, no, not her… I’m not ready to, um…”
“No, I understand. Then, who?”
The lip-chewing starts up again.
“Wait— Do you have a new boyfriend?”
Her face pales. “No, that?—”
“Then, who?”
She blurts it out like ripping off a Band Aid.
“Augusto.”
The room goes very, very quiet. I haven’t heard Paige speak his name since we left the safe house. And the weirdest thing about it is, it doesn’t feel weird. Oh, that, and she wants to invite him to her prom?
“What?” I say, now convinced I didn’t hear her correctly.
She winces. “Before you freak out?—”
“I’m not freaking out,” I say, although my eyes feel like they’re about to pop right out of my head. “Why would he want to come to a prom?” I throw my arms out to the sides. “He might be dead for all we know.”
Knowing the life he leads, it’s a distinct possibility, albeit one I don’t ever want to think about.
Her gaze lowers. “He’s not dead.”
I shift my feet, not caring that I’ve just stood in another blob of glue. “What?”
She peers up at me guiltily. “I said, he’s not dead.”
I take a steadying breath. “And how do you know that?”
That damn lip of hers is going to get chewed off at this rate.
“Paige…?”
“I… stayed in touch with him.”
Her words hit me like a slap, emotions that I’ve bottled up, shut away, pretended don’t exist, slamming into me like a truck.
“You what?”
Paige’s bottom lip has popped free of her teeth and is now trembling. “I didn’t tell you because I knew you’d say no but, I just— I thought—” Her words tumble over each other. “I thought maybe one day you’d realize you still love him and you want to go back and I didn’t want him to disappear from our lives completely!”
Anger surges up from my stomach, to my chest, to my throat and out my mouth so fast it steals my breath.
My voice shakes. “The entire reason I left was to protect you from that world. Fromdanger. From men like Morozov showing up in the middle of the night. From men like—” A sob bursts out of me, unexpectedly. “Like your father.”
Paige leaps to her feet and throws her arms around my neck.
“It wasn’t your fault, Mom,” she says, tears falling onto my neck. “What Dad did, it wasn’t your fault. And you can’t protect me from everything. And Augusto… he protected us. He didn’t bring danger, Mom, he stopped it.”
I hold her tight. Every word she’s saying is true, but acknowledging it makes me feel helpless, like she’s slipping from my grip somehow and I can’t protect her anymore.
She hiccups into me. “He’s never once spoken badly about you, Mom. Not once. He just… he always asks how you are, and if you’re happy. He still cares about you, Mom. He still loves you.”
That knocks the air clean out of me.
