Chapter Twenty-One
Twenty-One
I pounded on Micah’s door with a closed fist, pain exploding in my hand.
The cabin was awash in the 4Runner’s headlights, and I watched my shadow shift on the windows, Autumn’s backpack clutched to my chest with one arm beneath the opening of Johnny’s coat. I was still trembling. Still trying to catch my breath.
I didn’t remember standing up off the floor in the hallway or finding the car keys. I didn’t remember thinking about where I was going or why. It was as if time had stopped completely the moment I unzipped that bag. Like I’d blinked and suddenly appeared here, standing on Micah’s porch in the falling snow. I couldn’t even feel the cold anymore.
Footsteps sounded on the other side of the door before it opened, and when he saw me, the lines in Micah’s forehead carved deep with confusion. He eyed the blue checkered coat I was wearing—Johnny’s coat.
“James?” When he spoke my name, it took on a shape I didn’t recognize.
I just stared at him, willing my lips to move, but they wouldn’t. The connection between my brain and the rest of my body had been severed. I had no clue how I was even standing upright.
When I said nothing, Micah pulled me inside. “What’s going on?” He sounded scared. He looked scared.
Clumsily, numbly, I untangled myself from him, walking to the kitchen table, where I set down the backpack. I was still trying to convince myself that it was real. That I hadn’t imagined it into existence. When I looked at Micah, he, too, seemed to not understand what he was seeing.
I paced back and forth along the length of the table, hands going into my hair. “It was in his house.” I could barely hear myself. My voice was so thin.
“What?”
I gestured toward the backpack, the words unintentionally incomplete. “It was just…in his house.”
“James, what the hell is going on?” He grabbed my wrist and held it between us, forcing me to stop. His touch was hot and burning on my frozen skin.
I pulled from his grasp, putting a few inches between us.
“Where did you get that?”
“I told you.” I tried to slow my words down. “I found it at Johnny’s.”
Micah stared at it another few seconds before he stepped forward and opened the bag. He didn’t react at first, moving around the contents until he saw the phone. When he did, he didn’t touch it. “Is that…?”
“Her wallet. Keys. Everything.” I finished his thought.
Micah ran a hand over his face, palm pressing to his mouth.
“When’s the last time you saw Autumn Fischer?” I asked, hollow.
His answer was distracted, his own mind racing. “I don’t know. This summer? Before she went to school.”
“Except she didn’t. She never went.”
“What?”
“Autumn never made it to Byron. Never showed up.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that Autumn is gone! Missing! And her backpack was in my dead brother’s house!” Saying it out loud made it, impossibly, more horrifying. “So you’re going to tell me the truth. All of it. Right now.”
Micah pinned his pensive gaze to the floor between us. He was biting back his words. Growing more rigid as he swallowed them down.
“ Now. ” My voice rose.
“I don’t know anything about this.”
“Stop lying to me!”
“I’m not!”
I was ready to push him all the way off the cliff. I pulled my brother’s phone from my pocket, finding the voicemail and playing it on speaker.
Hey, Johnny.
I set it down on the table, crossing my arms.
Look—I know we’re not talking, but I need you to call me back. I’m worried. Text me, whatever. Just get in touch. Then you can go back to being pissed.
The message ended, and slowly, Micah’s eyes lifted to meet mine.
“What were you and Johnny fighting about?” My voice was barely audible. “What did he do, Micah?”
Slowly, Micah’s expression shifted. He was meeting my eyes now, hands heavy at his sides. “I don’t know. I mean, I’m not sure.”
“Not sure about what?”
He paced toward the fireplace, and when he turned back in my direction, he wasn’t looking at me anymore. “There were rumors going around that Johnny and Autumn were…getting involved. At first, I didn’t think there was any way it was true, but they were spending a lot of time together and—and I don’t know—I was just concerned.”
I stared at him.
“I confronted him about it and he totally lost it. He wouldn’t answer any of my questions, wouldn’t even have the conversation. I told him that if something was going on, he had to end it. And that if he didn’t, I wasn’t going to cover for him. Not this time.”
A shaking breath escaped my lips. “When was that?”
“Last summer. In June. He stopped talking to me. Wouldn’t return my calls—nothing.”
I tried to place it on the timeline in my head. That was before Johnny made the tuition payment to Byron. Before Autumn was supposed to leave for school.
“So, you hadn’t talked to him for months before he died.”
Micah’s jaw clenched, making the muscles in his throat strain. “No. He’d still show up and borrow the camper sometimes, but he just completely shut down. Didn’t want anything to do with me.”
“I asked you.” I took a step toward him. “I asked you if something was going on.”
“I know.”
“And now you’re telling me that he was fucking a teenager? Is that what you’re saying?”
“She was eighteen,” he muttered, pinching the bridge of his nose.
“Are you serious?” I gaped at him.
“I know! Okay?” he shouted back. “It’s fucked! But I never saw any actual proof that anything was going on, and he never admitted it to me.”
“I can’t believe this.” I glared at him. “I can’t believe you. ”
He stifled a laugh. “Me?”
“Yes, you! How could you not tell me about this? How could you let this happen?”
Micah sank into the chair beside the fireplace, a look of utter disbelief coming over him. We stared at each other, my blood boiling hot.
“That’s what we do, right?” His voice lowered.
“What?” I enunciated the word.
He flung a hand toward me. “This! This is what we do.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I snapped.
“We cover for him. That’s what we’ve always done, you and me. We take care of Johnny. We fix his mistakes. And deep down, you didn’t want me to tell you,” he said, dealing from the bottom of the deck.
My insides were writhing now. And not just because of what Micah was saying. It was how those words made me feel. He saw right through me, like always. There was no hiding with him. Everything always felt so naked. So exposed.
“That’s why you always took the fall for him, right? Because you couldn’t deal with who he was.” He kept going, pushing farther into the territory we’d managed to avoid.
“That’s not true.” I swallowed, feeling sick.
“It’s why you left.”
“No.”
“It is. And you know it. I mean, you blew up your whole life because of him.”
“You think that’s what I did when I went to San Francisco? Blew up my life?”
Micah’s hand went to his brow, rubbing between his eyes like he had a headache. “That’s not what I meant.”
“Then what did you mean?”
“You just left, James. You couldn’t cope with what happened, so you just cut it all from your life and pretended like it never existed. Like we never existed.”
I closed my eyes, trying to find a way to erase myself from that moment. And not just because of what Johnny did. I didn’t want to talk about the role I’d played in what happened.
“You have to stop taking responsibility for everything. What happened to Griffin was an accident. Did we do the right thing by lying? Probably not. But we can’t change it.”
I stared at him, that word— accident —twisting in my mind.
Micah looked so tired that the weight of it almost visibly dragged him down. “We’re not kids anymore, James. I loved Johnny, but he was who he was. He was erratic and impulsive. Sometimes, he was fucking selfish. You can’t just put all of that on me. Or yourself.”
I stood there, unmoving, stunned by the truth of the words. I hated them. I hated him for saying them out loud. Because we both knew they were true. I couldn’t feel the heat brimming beneath my skin or the stinging cold in my fingertips anymore. I couldn’t feel any single thing because if I did, I’d feel it all—an entire ocean of pain and regret and fear that I’d held on to like a life raft for my entire life.
“And Autumn?” I rasped. “What if he did something to her, Micah? What if he…”
His eyes focused, more alert now. “You…what? You think he killed her?”
“I don’t know what I think.”
“He wasn’t perfect, James. But Johnny wasn’t a murderer.”
I searched his eyes, looking for any sign that he was just trying to protect me from it. But Micah looked convinced. And why wouldn’t he be? He didn’t know what I did.
“It wasn’t an accident,” I whispered.
“What?”
“Griffin Walker. It wasn’t an accident. Not really.”
“What are you talking about?”
I was shaking all over now. “I could feel it, Micah. When Johnny went for that gun, when he went after Griffin, he wanted to hurt him.”
An unreadable expression flooded Micah’s face. He was still now. He didn’t even look like he was breathing.
“He wanted to hurt him. And he did.”
There was no way for Micah to know it. And I wasn’t even sure what he would have done if he had. We’d all agreed to lie. I remember the three of us standing out there in the dark with the dying fire, watching one another to see who would say it first. And we’d all kept our promise.
His chest rose as he took in a long, measured breath. Like he was trying to line up this new information with everything else. Like he was trying to reason out what he knew about Johnny. About all of us. That was a weight I’d carried for too many years, and now, it was on him.
“You think he meant to kill Griffin?”
“I don’t know. But I know he wanted to hurt him. And even if he didn’t, it doesn’t excuse what we did. It doesn’t make it right. We lied, Micah.”
“I know.”
“We were there. We saw what happened.”
“I know. ”
“I don’t want to believe it. But all of this doesn’t add up. Something…” My voice constricted. I couldn’t finish.
He leaned forward. “What?”
I let my head fall back, watching the firelight dance on the ceiling. “Something happened to that girl. I can feel it. And I’m terrified that it was him. That, in a way, it was all of us. What if Johnny was dangerous and we just couldn’t see it? Didn’t want to see it?”
“No.”
I studied him, the tone of his voice—that desperate sense of denial. The urge to grasp at any shred of evidence. It was like trying to convince myself. Micah was maybe the only other person in the world who would extend Johnny the same benefit of the doubt that I had for so many years.
“You’re right that I left because of what happened that night. And it wasn’t just because I was terrified by the idea of what Johnny had done.” I swallowed. “I was terrified of myself. Like I could suddenly see all those years, when I’d made choice after choice to take responsibility for everything he did. I loved my brother”—a sob broke the words—“but I knew I had to get away from him. And I knew that if I left him with you, he’d be safe.”
Micah ran both hands over his face again, eyes cast across the room. He let the silence draw out between us before he walked into the kitchen, picking up his phone.
“What are you doing?” I sniffed.
“The thing you won’t be able to.”
I went for the phone, but he moved it out of my reach. “Wait. We need to talk about this.”
“About what?”
My heart was racing, panic seizing every muscle in my body. “About what will happen if people find out about this.”
“It doesn’t matter, James. He’s gone.”
He didn’t blink, meeting my eyes in a way that told me he meant what he’d said. And he knew that he was right about all of it. Johnny had protected me, but I’d spent my whole life protecting him, too. I didn’t know how to not do that. I didn’t know how to not be that person anymore.
Micah stood there, phone still in hand. He waited patiently for me to nod, and then he dialed. We stood there as it rang, and when he spoke again, the baritone of his voice bellowed in the room.
“Hey, Amelia, it’s Micah.” He paused. “Sorry for the late call, but I need to talk to you.”