Chapter 23
23
ECHO
Someone drops down beside me, but I don’t look over, even though I can feel them staring at me. Instead, I keep my eyes trained on the textbook on my lap. The sun is warm on my shoulders, but the breeze in the university courtyard is just enough to keep me from napping.
“Echo?”
Damn. I should have known better than to think she would take a hint.
I turn toward my new companion. “Hi, Soraya. Did Tyler send you?”
Soraya arches her eyebrows. “As a matter of fact, no. But I did hear that he messed up again.”
My stomach churns. I’m so sick of everyone knowing my business. “I suppose you knew about Ryan before me?”
“Ryan?” For a moment, she seems taken aback, but then her expression smoothes over. “I knew that he had someone keeping an eye on you. I didn’t know who that person was.”
Every goddamn person around me knows more about my own life than I do. I can’t decide whether I’d prefer to bury my face or scream. It’s embarrassing that others know one of my most trusted friends is nothing more than a liar who was using me as a way to make money.
“How many people know?” I ask quietly.
“About Ryan?” She shrugs. “You, me, and those two idiots, if I had to guess.”
I snort. “They are idiots.”
She picks at her cuticles. “What are you more upset about? Tyler keeping things from you, the fact he’s been trying to manage your life, or Ryan befriending you under false pretenses?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know. All of it.”
“If it helps, I’m sure they both genuinely care about you.”
I level her with a gaze. “How would you know that? Do you even know Ryan?”
“We met recently.” She focuses even more intently on her nails, her cheeks a pretty shade of pink. “He seemed like a good person. Loyal to you. He had no reason to fake anything around me, and that’s the impression I got. He seemed ready to tear Tyler’s head off before he realized I was his sister and not a random hookup.”
Somehow, that makes me feel better—or at least, more willing to accept Ryan’s claim that he honestly considers me a friend.
“Thanks for telling me.”
Her gaze flits around the courtyard. Once again, I’m struck by how similar her features are to Tyler’s. Except that on him, they’re broader and more masculine, whereas hers are delicate. She’s very All American.
“No problem.” Her eyes settle on me again, a little brighter than Tyler’s. “Just so you know, Tyler would worship the ground you walked on, if you let him. He may not always come across well, and sometimes he makes stupid decisions, but Dad was fucked up, and none of us got out of that house without scars.”
“You don’t have to tell me—”
“Tyler’s scars are mostly psychological,” she continues, ignoring my interruption. “Mine are more physical. Although I didn’t escape the psychological warfare either.”
“I’m sorry.”
She shrugs again, looking away. I get the feeling she doesn’t like talking about this, and I don’t blame her. It must bring back a lot of bad memories.
“Tyler regrets the choices he made back then. After Eric Weston got sent away like the criminal he is, Tyler just wanted to make sure you were safe, and he was prepared to do whatever it took. He might not have gone about it the right way, but his intentions were good.”
“That’s the problem.” I sigh. “He always has good intentions, but how many other secrets is he keeping?”
“He was emotionally damaged, and he’s doing the best he can. He’s trying.”
“I know.” Perhaps I’m not being entirely fair to him. It’s just hard to continually have the rug pulled out from beneath my feet. “Still, you grew up in the same household and you seem to understand what’s okay and what isn’t.”
She grimaces. “You can thank several months of intense therapy for that. Tyler and I have both been seeing professionals since Dad died.”
“Oh.” I frown. “He never mentioned it.”
“He probably didn’t want you to worry about him.”
I wince, experiencing a pang of guilt. Sure, I have my own issues, but I care enough about Tyler that I should have at least taken the time to find out something like whether he sees a therapist. I’ve had plenty of opportunities to ask, but I never did. What does that say about me?
“I’ll do better.” Provided we continue to see each other.
Soraya chips away at the paint on one of her nails, dislodging flecks of pink. “I wouldn’t take it too personally. It can be hard to get things out of him sometimes, especially if he doesn’t want you to know. He had to learn to keep a lid on his emotions. I may have borne the worst of Dad’s physical abuse, but Tyler was never allowed to show weakness.”
My chest squeezes. “If your dad were still alive, I think I’d like to kick him in the balls.”
A laugh bursts from her, and her eyes widen as if she’s surprised by it. “Get in line.”
Something softens in the air between us. A sense of understanding.
“Hey, would you like to get an ice cream?” Soraya suggests. “It’s a nice day for it, and we can keep talking for a while longer.”
I snap my textbook shut. “Let’s do it. Honestly, I was just staring at the page anyway. None of it is going into my head.”
She pulls a face. “I get that. My mind goes down a rabbit hole sometimes if I start thinking of the past or letting myself dwell on negatives.”
Sympathy wells up within me. Somehow, despite our different backgrounds, I’m beginning to believe we might be kindred spirits.
I pack my textbook into my backpack, stand, and sling the bag over my shoulder. “The ice cream place a block over?”
“Perfect.” She grins. “I’m craving their salted caramel swirl.”
We walk side by side in companionable silence. After a few minutes, Soraya glances at me out of the corner of her eye.
“Would you like to hear more about Dad?” she asks.
“Only if you’re willing to talk about him. I know how triggering it can be.”
“It’s fine. He can’t hurt me now.”
Does it make me a bad person that, for a second, I wish I was in the same situation, with Eric Weston dead rather than in prison?
We pause at a crossing and wait for the walking light to turn green.
“As far as I know, Dad was always violent toward Mom,” she says. “When I was young, I didn’t realize that most dads didn’t shout and hit people when things didn’t go their way. I don’t know when it started. Mom doesn’t talk about it, although I’ve been working on getting her into therapy, so hopefully she will soon.”
“Whose idea was it for you all to go to therapy?” I ask, curious.
She flashes me a small smile. “Tyler’s.”
For some reason, that doesn’t surprise me. Ahead, the light changes, and we hurry across the street.
“Dad hit me for the first time when I was maybe five or six. At least, that’s the first time I can remember. It’s strange, but I was so shocked that he’d hurt me, even though I’d seen him do the same to Mom.”
Nausea rolls in my gut. “You felt safe with him. He was your father.”
“I guess. Anyway, he was never as physically violent with Tyler as he was with us. At first, I thought he loved me less, or that perhaps it was a man/woman thing, but eventually I grew to understand that he just didn’t want to jeopardize his chances of having an NHL player son. Injuring Tyler was too risky.”
“He sounds like a real piece of work.”
She nods. “He was. He put so much pressure on Tyler as soon as he realized he had potential. He monitored his food intake and insisted he spend hours training every day—to the extent that his peewee coach banned Ty from extra ice time because he was worried about him. That didn’t stop Dad though. He just came up with backyard drills instead.”
“That must have been hard for Tyler.” And Soraya too. She’d been abused or ignored, while Tyler had been controlled and pushed to his limits.
“It only got worse over time.” Her arm brushes mine and she seems to instinctively put more space between us. Is that an ingrained self-protective habit? I know I tend to do the same.
“How so?”
“He wouldn’t let Ty go out with his friends, and he wouldn’t let up about his grades. Ty did pretty well, considering, but how was he supposed to find the time to study when Dad was constantly hounding him to train?”
“He put him in an impossible position.” I know I’m academically gifted, but even my grades would suffer if I didn’t have any time to do my assignments or prepare for tests.
“It didn’t stop there though. He refused to have any treats in the house. No chocolate or chips. If a game went poorly, he’d break down every single thing he thought Tyler had done wrong and then work him until he puked. He wouldn’t even let him choose what college to go to. He’d already decided that Princeton was the only acceptable option.”
“He told me that. About Princeton, I mean. He didn’t want to go there.”
At the time, I’d had no idea what I could do or say to help. He’d insisted that I not talk to his dad as I’d proposed, and in hindsight, I understood why he’d been so adamant about it.
Someone coming the other way bumps into me, and I shift closer to Soraya.
“What doesn’t make sense to me is why I was such a threat in your father’s eyes that he had to force us apart.”
She glances over. “My guess is that he was worried you’d interfere with the plan he’d set out for Tyler. None of the other girls he’d been with mattered to him, but Dad knew that you did, and he might have thought Tyler would begin pushing back against his orders.”
“I suppose that makes sense.” Oddly, it pleases me to be told that I meant more to Tyler than the others—especially coming from someone other than him.
The ice cream parlor is on our left, and I push the glass door open and hold it for Soraya. There’s a long line in front of the counter, so we cross the black-and-white checkered floor to join it. A collection of bubblegum-pink bar stools are positioned in front of the counter, but no one is sitting at them.
I scan the selection of ice creams, but I can’t see far enough to tell what flavors are at the other end of the cabinet.
“Echo.” Soraya’s fingertips brush my upper arm.
I turn to her. “Yes?”
She lowers her voice. “What Dad did to Tyler fucked with his head so badly that he hardly slept for months. Sometimes, he was in such a bad frame of mind that I thought he might just decide to end it all.”
“No,” I gasp, pain burning in my chest.
The world shouldn’t exist without Tyler Kinsey in it. I refuse to even imagine it.
“I’m completely serious.”
I know she is, and tears fill my eyes. “I’m so grateful he didn’t.”
“Me too. I’m not trying to make you feel bad. I just want you to understand that, sometimes, the only thing that got him through those dark times was counting down to the day he’d sign a contract with the NHL and Dad wouldn’t be able to hold our safety or your education over his head anymore.”
My brain goes blank. Is she implying that Tyler would have come for me eventually, even if his father hadn’t died? That he was biding time until he could financially support us all? What kind of person even does that?
A selfless one.
One who’s much better than I’ve given him credit for.
Certainly a better person than me.
“Excuse me, Miss?”
I jolt around. Somehow, I’m now at the front of the line.
“What would you like?” the girl behind the counter asks.
Barely able to think straight, I ask for a salted caramel swirl because Soraya mentioned it earlier and it’s the first thing to pop into my head. She orders the same, and once we have our ice creams, we slide into a pink-and-white vinyl booth near the door.
“Are you okay?” Soraya asks, her face creased with concern.
“Yeah.” I rub my temple. “Just having a hard time accepting that Tyler spent years planning for a future with me. After what happened at the prom, I assumed that none of our relationship had been real and that he wouldn’t think of me again.”
The edges of her mouth twitch. “Don’t you hate it when people make you rethink things you thought you knew?”
“Yes.” The frustration in my tone is obvious. “Because now I doubt everything that I think happened, and I can’t help wondering if I’m to blame for not seeing what was going on and helping him. You were both stuck in a nightmare situation, and I didn’t do anything about it.”
Soraya swirls a wooden teaspoon in her ice cream. She had opted for a cup, while I took a cone. “You offered to help though, didn’t you?”
“At the beginning, yes. But I shouldn’t have let him put me off.” I lick a trickle of ice cream that’s melting down the side of the cone and savor the salty sweetness.
“Then he might have pushed you away before anything between you went further,” she pointed out. “And what could you have done, really? Dad had friends in the police, at our school, and plenty of clout. I doubt you would have made a difference.”
“But we’ll never know.”
She seems unbothered. “We all have our burdens to bear. I guess that ‘what if’ is one of yours.”
“How are you so calm about this?” I ask.
“For me, it’s just the facts of life. None of it is a surprise, or new information. I’ve had time to process.” She licks ice cream off her spoon and murmurs her appreciation. “So good. I needed this.”
I nod and get to work on the ice cream before it melts all over my hands. As I eat, the anger simmers within me. Instead of going away, it builds. When I’ve had enough, I toss the rest of the cone in the bin and wipe my hands on a napkin.
“I hate your dad,” I say calmly. “I wish I could bring him back just to make him pay for everything he did to you all.”
Soraya tilts her head to the side. “I hate him, too. So does Tyler. But neither of us want him back. Not even for punishment. Not even to ease Tyler’s guilt.”
“What do you mean? What does he feel guilty about?”
She pushes her cardboard cup away, the spoon sticking out of what remains of her salted caramel swirl. “I told you before that he was with Dad when he died. When I found out, for about two minutes, I wondered if he had something to do with it.”
I stare at her for a long moment. Tyler twisted himself into knots for everyone around him, and his own sister could still believe him capable of that?
“How could you think that? He’s a good person.”
“Even good people hit their breaking point sometimes.” She’s so calm. So measured. It isn’t right.
“He wouldn’t—”
“She’s right to wonder.” The voice comes from my left, and I spin to face the intruder.
It’s Tyler.
His expression is impossible to read, but it’s obvious he overheard at least some of our conversation.
“Ty…”
“It’s okay.” He drops onto the bench beside me. “She wasn’t wrong to ask the question. The truth is, when Dad started having chest pains, I hesitated before calling the ambulance. If I hadn’t, he might still be alive.”