Chapter 30
CORA
I resort to taking a muscle relaxant. After the last few days, sleep refuses to come, and I feel like if I’m forced to know one more horrific thing against my will, it could literally kill me if I can’t get at least a small amount of sleep first. The ceiling fan is off, and Finn is gone, and I feel more desperately alone than I ever thought possible.
They say feeling alone with someone else is worse than really being alone, but right now, I don’t know.
After just a few hours of sleep, my anxiety wakes me up.
My mind is racing, but the medicine makes me feel sluggish and groggy.
Still, I force myself to the coffee maker and start a pot, then I text Mia to come home right away.
When she responds asking why, I just text back, Now, and to my surprise, by the time I finish my first cup of coffee, she’s pulling into the driveway.
She sprints into the house, dropping her stuff, and stops cold when she sees me at the kitchen island, looking her up and down.
“What’s the freakin’ emergency?” she asks, and I look at her in her stupid pajamas and beautiful, unkempt hair she got from me, and her innocent face, and I wish I could take away what she saw that night, but I can’t, and she’s almost an adult, and she needs to answer for what happened.
I ask her to sit down, and she does. Then I turn my phone around and play her the video. Her face goes pale and ghostly.
“Oh, my God! Why are you going through my stuff?” she says, and I see her eyes dart, her mind racing for an explanation.
“No. You don’t get to say that now—not about this.” I smack my phone down on the counter and look at her. “Why, after all we’ve been through with Paige searching, with Caleb, with—Why would you hide this?”
She stares at the floor.
“Mia,” I say. She keeps her head down.
“I wanted to help him. We were just coming home and saw him. I was gonna call the police, but we heard them coming, so...”
“Who’s we?” I ask, sharply.
“Ryan,” she says. The boyfriend I thought she was moping over all this time after they broke up. I guess she was carrying something much bigger than that.
“You didn’t call the police or tell me or anyone else because you heard sirens coming?
That doesn’t add up.” I think about Caleb in the video.
Unmoving, eyes open. The fear he must have felt.
Even though I know he was high, and I know Nicola had to protect herself, it wasn’t the real him.
Maybe Finn could have helped him instead of buying drugs off him.
My heart breaks for Caleb, and I’m furious at how so many secrets built this fortress around the truth.
“Ryan got some pills. Some...”
“Some what? What does that have to do with anything?”
“Some Molly,” she says, not making eye contact.
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Mom.”
“It’s a drug. You’re telling me you were on drugs?”
“I promise, I never did it again. I hated it. I was so sick the next day. He had a party in his basement. He said it would be fun just one time. Mom, if we called the police, my life would be over!” Now she starts to cry.
“The police were coming, and there was nothing I could do, so I listened to him when he said we had to get out of there.”
“So you not only took the drug, but let a completely high kid drive you home?”
“Mom, I’m sorry. It never happened again.
That was almost a year ago, and I’ve never touched anything since then.
I promise. I thought I’d never go to college, I’d have a record—I didn’t know what would happen, but I couldn’t tell.
And I didn’t know Ryan recorded it. He sent the video to me.
He thought it was cool he had it, and I broke up with him—that’s why, ’cause he was such a creep about it,” she says, and then walks over to the sink and pulls a paper towel from the roll to wipe the streaks of mascara from her cheeks.
“Why did you keep the video?” I ask. She throws the towel away and takes another, blotting it under her eyes, then sits back on the stool and sighs.
“I didn’t know if Ryan would try to get revenge.
He was angry about the breakup. I didn’t even know what he would do—give details about the scene, somehow point the finger at me.
I just kept it, I guess, because it proves I tried to help and that he was the one trying to leave the scene and the one driving in case anyone thought we hit Caleb.
..” She’s rambling. I pick up my phone and find the video.
“Look at this again,” I say, and she does.
“Okay? What?”
“That car. Do you remember seeing it drive off?” I ask, and she watches it again.
“Yeah, I guess.”
“You guess?”
“Yes. I remember, because my first instinct was to flag it down for help, but it must have not seen him because it was driving past, I guess,” she says, and I take in a deep breath and blow it out hard through my lips.
“Are they gonna arrest me?” she whimpers and starts crying again.
I stand and put my arms around her, pressing her head into my chest. “I’m sorry.
I should have told you. The news said someone heard a gunshot and called the police, but Caleb was dead before the police got there, so I knew there was nothing I could have done.
Mom, if there was—if the ambulance weren’t coming, I would have said something—I would have stayed!
” She’s sobbing now. I hold her close to me.
“Shhh. They’re not going to arrest you, okay? I promise. But there will be a lot of questions. We have to turn this in,” I say, and she pulls away, horror on her face.
“Why?”
“I can’t explain it all to you right now, but I can promise that you’re not in trouble,” I say, even though I want to rage and tell her how sitting on this all this time left Paige drowning in pain—the not knowing, the suspicion of everyone—but on the other hand, if she had turned it in before, there’d probably be another life lost—Nicola’s.
So at this point, it’s a damn good thing she didn’t.
“Hang out at home today, okay?” I say, and she nods obediently and hops off the stool and walks toward her room without another word, happy to be done with the conversation.
I sit in the stillness of the kitchen. I look across at the windows and watch the wind whip the fallen leaves into spirals on the sidewalk.
I cross to the gas fireplace and turn it on, then sit in front of it, staring into the artificial embers.
Finn sits in jail for something he didn’t do, and we can’t turn in the person who did do it. What have we done?