“Jesus. Of course you ran. You were a child. There was nothing you could’ve done.”
I soothed myself with one long breath, the familiar numbness returning. “I told my parents. I was terrified, but I needed to tell them. My older brother was there. He was sixteen and a carbon copy of my dad—narcissism and all. My mom just stood there and watched while they punished me with a belt. She didn’t say a word. My dad and brother didn’t stop yelling at me the whole time, calling me names and accusing me of things I didn’t yet understand. Impure things. They said,how dare you speak against the prophet, the man chosen by God tosave our souls from the rapture.I couldn’t eat dinner, and I was forbidden to leave my room for a week. They threw away all my toys and left me only with a Bible. After, no one spoke of it ever again.”
My tears drenched Wes’s shirt as he held me.
“Everything carried on as usual. That was one of the community’s best methods of control: abuse and silencing, followed by an eerie normalcy that made you doubt if anything had ever happened at all. But I never forgot, and I never forgave myself for knowing what was happening to Lorelei and not stopping it.” A familiar fire lit up my veins. “I was the one who found ways around parental controls, getting Lorelei and myself access to all kinds of forbidden media and corners of the Internet. I was the one who crafted our escape plan, who convinced Lorelei over a long period of time that we needed to leave the minute we turned eighteen. In the end, she thought we’d come up with the scheme together, no idea that I’d been subtly pushing her toward it for years. Mary and Esther became Nova and Lorelei.”
Guilt plagued me, a shame I often avoided feeling at all costs.
“I thought I’d saved her and, by extension, savedmyself. But it wasmydream to come to New York. It wasmydream to go to NYU and become a successful romance author under a name my family would never recognize. I brought Lorelei with me, intomyworld; all the while, she had never left the one we escaped. She was—is—still trapped in that house with her father. I ruined her life,” I said, voice shaking now as I admitted to someone for the first time what I’d never said aloud. “She started drinking the moment we landed in New York to cope with her night terrors, and she hasn’t stopped since. She had no direction, no resources to get help for what had happened to her. She didn’t want to go to school. She didn’t even want to live. All she wanted was to escape with men who made her feel like shit and substancesthat made her feel nothing at all. I’ve spent the last seven years trying to make her happy, keep her safe, becauseIwas the one who dragged her up here in the first place, to a city where we had nothing and no one but each other.”
My shoulders were heavy with the weight of my guilt. Hudson didn’t understand. No one had ever understood my devotion to Lorelei. But Wes—Wes might.
“That was why I entered The Circle,” I continued. “Why I can’t just abandon her when I know something sinister is happening. However her new boyfriend is abusing her ismy fault.” I completely slumped against Wes, exhausted by the burden I’d been dutifully carrying by myself for so many years. “When I was nine, I ran. I can’t do that to her again.”
28
NOVA
Wes held me as my heightened emotions settled and my body fought its way back to equilibrium. I wasn’t sure how much time had passed by the time he spoke.
“I realize this is a pot calling the kettle black moment, but I would be remiss if I didn’t say it anyway,” Wes said gently. “Lorelei is not your side of the street. You did not force her to do anything. She is an adult who can make her own decisions. I am sure if you were to ask her, she would likely have a different interpretation of those events than you do.”
I shook my head, pulling back from the wet spot I’d made on his chest. “No, I know it’s what she thinks too. Because that’s what she told me right before she abruptly left us for The Circle and her newest abuser. She said—” I cut myself off, suddenly ashamed of my own vulnerability.
Wes waited as I looked anywhere but at him.
“I begged her to get help for her drinking for the thousandth time. And she told me it was time she saved herself… fromme,” I whispered, angry tears blurring my vision. “She said she had to get away from me because she didn’t want to be…”
I couldn’t finish. I still remembered her exact words, seared into my mind, a constant loop that had haunted me the past four months.
“I can’t stay in this place a second longer with a delusional, lonely, cowardly loser who wants me to be just as miserable as she is,” she’d said after Hudson and I confronted her in the living room.“Your life is the same day over and over. You move from screen to screen, begging to be noticed, begging to be chosen. You see the same five people on rotation. You have all these big dreams, but you don’t do a single meaningful thing to bring them into reality. You brought me to New York to live—butI’mthe only one living. All you do is exist. You’re a nihilistic black hole, just like the rest of our hopeless, useless generation. You have no higher purpose, no higher reason for why you do anything you do, no community,nothing. You’renothing, Nova. And you won’t ever change. You write all these romances because you grew up hoping a white knight would save you.” Her nose wrinkled with contempt, her blue eyes icy as her lips curled. “But you can’t even let a man?—"
“Shut up!” I yelled back, eyes burning, throat clogged with shame.“You promised. Don’t.”
I blinked the memory away, unable to vocalize it. All I told Wes were her final words before she slammed her bedroom door in my face and started packing.
“She said, ‘If I have any hope of getting better, it will be far away fromyou.’”
Wes’s eyes flashed anger, and it took me a second to realize it was toward Lorelei, not me. He traced my cheekbone with the utmost tenderness. “She’s an addict, Nova. She would say or do anything in the world to get you off her back and continue spiraling. Trust me, I’ve been there. Andyou’readdicted to trying to save her, when the difficult truth is, no one can save Lorelei but herself.”
I didn’t have anything left to say. I’d exhausted my reserves. I hated thinking about what Lorelei had said to me. She had expertly crafted an exact replica of my deepest fears. Because she knew me better than anyone, she knew how to hurt me better than anyone.
I hated that she’d succeeded most of all. Hudson had called her a crazy bitch, letting what she’d said to him roll right off, but I’d let her words take up permanent residence in my very core.
“Thank you for being so open with me, Nova,” Wes said. “I can see how much energy you’ve poured into others. Now, will you let me take care ofyoutonight?”
I stared at Wes like he was asking me to solve a complex algebra problem.
“I’m going to take that adorable, confused expression as ayes,” Wes said with a crooked curve of his lips. “Come on. Now that you’ve ogled my marble countertops, I need you toooh and ahhat my record collection.”
My lips twitched. “And this oohing and ahhing would make you feel like a big, strong man?”
“Oh, yes.” He helped me up from the couch and steered me to the shelves of records against the exposed brick wall. “And to ensure I maximize my insufferableness, I need you to know this is only what I’ve chosen to display. The cream of the crop. Much more downstairs, in case you can’t find what you’re looking for.”
I scanned the shelves. Wes had organized them alphabetically by band like the coaster-using freak he was.
“Choose one, please.”
