Chapter 42
Chapter Forty-Two
FLETCHER
I’ve always hated hospitals. It’s the smell. It feels stale, and it’s always so strong you can taste it.
I shouldn’t even be here right now. I should’ve gone with Christine and Casey.
But the moment I saw them carry Jacks out of the house, I knew what I had to do. I called my parents. My mom was a nurse for nearly ten years before she met Dad and decided to change careers, so leaving Christine and Casey with her at least lessened some of my anxiety. She’ll know what to look for, what to do.
And this is something I need to do on my own.
I hang my head between my shoulders and sigh. A headache pounds in my eye sockets.
I did this. I let her back into my life, let her around the people I love.
Mom tried to warn me. She saw something I couldn’t. She’s always had good instincts. Why didn’t I listen to her?
A nurse leads me back minutes—hours?—later. She tells me the police haven’t been in to see her. Yet.
Jacks gives me a tired smile as I step through the door. Her hair is bloody and matted, and both arms are wrapped in bandages.
“You came,” she breathes.
I stop a pace inside the door, and her smile falters.
I cross my arms over my chest and fight the sudden urge to cry. This entire night has been a fever dream. Every time I blink I feel like I’m slipping in and out of reality. One moment I’m in the present, the next, I’m in a memory of that night. I look at Jacks, and I see an eighteen-year-old. I blink, and she’s eight again.
It’s so fucking confusing.
A part of me feels like I raised Jacks. She was basically Casey’s age when I knew her. And our foster parents were intoxicated in one way or another the majority of the time, so the responsibility in the house fell to me. If I didn’t cook, the kids didn’t eat. If I didn’t hound Jacks to do her homework, it didn’t get done. If I didn’t help with hair and shoes in the morning, they missed the bus.
I may have left that place, but a part of me has always stayed there.
And having her back in my life, I admit, I’d started to imagine things. I’d started to hope for things. Family has always been an evolving word for me. But maybe it was fate that had brought us back together after all these years. A second chance. And she seemed like maybe she could fit in with my life here. That maybe this tangled, complicated family situation I’ve built for myself could include her too. And I’d wanted it to. She’s the closest thing I’ve ever had to a real sibling. And having her back was the first time it seemed like maybe those two versions of my life could coexist. That I hadn’t needed to leave everything behind and have a clean slate here.
But now?—
“Why were you at Christine’s house, Jacks?” I ask, and my voice barely sounds like it belongs to me. Her eyes shift, and she opens her mouth. I recognize that look immediately and cut in, “Don’t lie to me. I know about the teacher at your school. Your old boyfriend. Our house. Tell me the truth, Jacks, or I swear to God I will walk out that door right now and you will never see me again.”
She looks down at her lap and bites her lip. She murmurs something too low for me to hear. I drift forward another step.
“What?”
Her forehead wrinkles as she says, “I tried to stop it.”
“Stop what?”
She meets my eyes. Hers are desperate, pleading. It makes my stomach feel like it’s full of ice.
“The fire,” she whispers. “I regretted it right away and I tried to stop it.”
The ice cracks.
I rub a hand over my face and pace along the end of her bed.
I wanted her to deny it, I realize. Needed her to. I wanted an explanation. An excuse. Something even remotely believable to latch on to. Anything, anything other than this.
“How could you do this?” I ask, and my voice comes out hoarse.
“I tried?—”
“How could you do this?” I demand and whip around. My hands clench into fists at my sides, and I have to take a deep breath to keep from yelling. “ Why would you do this to Christine? She tried to help you. She was good to you.”
“She wanted me to leave, okay! That’s the only reason she was helping me with the stupid GED anyway, to get me out of your house as fast as possible.”
“I—Jacks, she was trying to help you. She knows better than anyone what struggling is like, especially at your age. To have no one to fall back on, to have nothing.” My voice breaks, and I suck my teeth for a moment. “She was trying to help you so you could help yourself and not have to get help the way she did.” I sigh as something occurs to me. “You did fail on purpose, didn’t you? Because you thought if you passed, you’d have to leave.”
And I’m sure catching on to that made Christine look like even more of a threat in her eyes.
Jacks drops her gaze.
“And Casey ?” I demand. “Was he collateral damage? He’s just a kid.”
A tear rolls down her cheek. “I know, okay? I know I screwed up. I didn’t—I got scared. I didn’t have a backup plan. I found you online years ago. And the idea of getting out and finding you after I turned eighteen was the only thing that got me through these past few years. You’re the only person who’s ever looked out for me. So when I thought you’d…that she was…that I’d have to leave…”
I hate the way my stomach drops, the way my heart twists.
I go back to pacing.
“Fletcher,” she gasps, her voice breaking around my name. “I don’t—I don’t know why I do the things I do sometimes, okay? I know I’m all messed up. I just?—”
I stop at the foot of her bed. “Lucy.”
She flinches and looks away.
“ Lucy ,” I say through my teeth.
“I know,” she croaks.
“She was five ?—”
“I know!” Jacks shouts, tears running down her face now, and she breathes heavily through gritted teeth. “And I’ve carried that with me my entire life?—”
“But you still did it again!” I’m shaking. Head to toe I am vibrating with rage. The piece of that night that I never dare to think about, that every cell in my body has been fighting to keep out of my memory floods back.
We made it out the window. I got her out. I got her out . But by the time we were on the ground, she wasn’t breathing.
I remember an ambulance in the street by then. I’d sprinted for it with her in my arms.
They tried everything. CPR. Oxygen. Her throat was so swollen they couldn’t get a tube down it.
I couldn’t hear anything. My ears were ringing. But I was on my knees at her side begging them, begging them , to keep trying.
All these years I’ve blamed myself. I let her go. I didn’t get her out fast enough. I didn’t wake up soon enough. So many little things I could’ve done differently and maybe today she’d still be alive.
I blink back to the room. To the face of the person who started the fire.
Because that noise, that itching that’s been in the back of my mind for months, I remember it now.
It wasn’t Jacks shaking me that woke me up. It was footsteps on the squeaky stairs.
Coming up from the kitchen, down the hall, and then into my room.
Because the cigarettes didn’t start the fire. And I didn’t leave the stove on.
She went down there and set it herself.
“You know what? I might have been able to forgive you for that. We were kids, and you were going after Joan and Bob. I know you didn’t mean for that to happen. But Christine and Casey?” My voice breaks around their names.
For a moment, when I saw Chris buried under the ceiling, I’d thought she was dead. That I was too late.
“Please, Fletcher, you have to forgive me.”
“You tried to kill them .” The heat rises in my chest like my voice is aching to scream, to yell, but the words come out low and quiet and shaking. “Even if we set aside for a second”—I can’t help but laugh because I can’t fucking believe these words are coming out of my mouth—“that killing people, inherently, is wrong. What about me, Jacks? Someone you supposedly care about?—”
“I do care about you?—”
“Do you have any idea what losing them would’ve done to me?”
I can’t even fathom it. The moment my brain tries, everything inside of me repels it with a vicious desperation.
My life wasn’t bad before Christine. And maybe I could’ve gone on that way forever. But once she stepped into my life, there was no going back. Because knowing what life looked like with her in it—everything was different. The way I breathed, the way I walked, the way my heart beat. She was a vital organ I didn’t know I had, one that had been living outside of my body for the first twenty-three years of my life.
Losing her wouldn’t just devastate me. It would destroy me.
“I know it was wrong. Fletcher, I tried to stop it?—”
I bark out a laugh again and pace the length of the room. My entire body is vibrating with restless, uncontrollable energy. My nostrils flare as I meet Jacks’s eyes, and a violence I have never felt floods my veins. I have never thought I’d be capable of hurting someone until now.
Lowly, I force out, “I will never forgive you for this. And if you have even a shred of a soul left you will tell the police exactly what you did when they come in here.”
Her chin wobbles. “Fletcher?—”
“Don’t ever speak to me again. Don’t ever come near me or the people I love again. You and me, we are done, Jacks.”
“You’re all I have,” she cries.
I pause in the door. She looks so small surrounded by all those machines. Footsteps echo down the hall as a pair of police officers makes their way toward us.
My face feels wet, and my throat is tight.
The last thing I say to her is “The Jacks I knew died in that fire with Lucy.”