Chapter 60 Adela
The first thing I hear is my mother crying.
I try to open my mouth, and what comes out isn't a word. It's barely a sound. But she hears it, and her hand finds mine before I've fully understood what’s going on.
"I'm here." Her grip tightens. "Right here."
I breathe.
Pain arrives sharply. My leg first. Then my back. My hands. My throat feels like sand. My ribs burn when I breathe. Everything feels like I’ve been hit by a bus.
I turn my head and stop breathing.
I must still be under. That's the only explanation my brain offers because what I'm looking at doesn't exist in the real version of my life.
The real version of my life has kept them in separate worlds, separate versions of me, separate everything.
The idea that those worlds collapsed while I was unconscious is too large to process all at once, so I just —
Stare.
Cody. Beckett. Theo.
My heart monitor says something loud and embarrassing. A nurse appears. My mother stands and turns on all three of them.
"I knew this was a bad idea. All of you. Out."
"Mom."
My voice doesn't sound like mine. Rough and small and stripped. But it crosses the room, and it reaches her, and she turns back, and the edge drops by one degree.
She looks at me with everything she's feeling moving behind her eyes — the fear, the relief, the questions— and she holds my hand and doesn't say anything else.
Cody comes to me first.
He walks to my bedside. He looks at my leg for a moment, and something moves across his face that I've never seen before. Not the performed emotion. Not the managed version. Something real and undefended that he doesn't try to take back.
He leans down and cries on my chest.
His arms come around me carefully, mindful of everything that hurts.
"I love you, baby." He grabs my face in both hands and looks at me. His eyes are red. "I was so scared. Don't ever do that to me again."
I open my mouth.
"Shh." He kisses my forehead. Then my cheek.
Then he puts his mouth to my ear and says quietly, "We have a lot to talk about.
We'll talk later. Okay? Later." He pulls back and looks at my face and wipes his own and takes three steps back because he knows — he has always known — when to give me room.
Beckett and Theo come together.
They stop at the foot of my bed. Beckett leans forward with his elbows on his knees and his eyes on me and doesn't say anything. Theo is already looking at me — the way he looked at me at the park, at the bookstore, in the alley — like he’s deep in thought.
He has a book in his hand.
It’s the same one he read to me at the park.
"What are you doing here?" I say to him. My voice still isn't right.
He holds up the book. "I'm here to read to you."
Just that. No explanation for the rest of it. No accounting for the fact that he is standing at the foot of my hospital bed next to a man I used to sleep with, while my boyfriend cries three feet away.
He pulls the chair close and opens the book.
My mother looks at all of it. At all of them. Her face holds every question I'm also holding.
"Actually," I say.
Theo looks up.
"Mom." I look at her. "Can you…”
She looks at me. She knows what I'm asking. She squeezes my hand.
“I’ll get you water,” she murmurs, releasing my hand.
The door closes behind her.
The room changes immediately. I look at the three of them, and they look at me. Nobody says anything for a moment.
I breathe through the pain in my leg.
I breathe through all of it.
Then I ask, "How do you know each other?"
It’s quiet. None of them are rushing to answer my question.
I look at Theo.
He looks back at me steadily. Not flinching and not performing calmly. It’s unsettling.
"We play together," he says.
I look at him, confused.
"I play hockey," he says, "for UW."
The room tilts, but I realize it hasn’t. It’s just me.
I look at Cody.
He's looking at the window.
I look at Beckett.
He's looking at his hands.
I look back at Theo.
At the face, I have been reading for months in the library on the third floor, in the political science section.
At the face I looked at across a table at Barnes and Noble with my knees pulled up in a chair.
At the face I kissed in a park above the water while he read philosophy out loud and I thought — I genuinely thought — that this was mine.
This was the one thing that was entirely mine.
Outside of all of it. Not connected to any of it.
He's been on Cody's team this entire time, and I had no idea.
He’s known exactly who I am.
Every library meeting. The margin notes in the book. He knew exactly who was sitting across from him, and he sat there anyway. He wrote back anyway. He bought me a book and read to me in a park and kissed me and said this isn't a mistake, you'll see and he knew.
"The library," I say.
He watches me carefully.
"You knew who I was?"
"Yes," he says.
I look at him.
Then I look at Beckett.
I look at the two of them standing together. I think about a broken finger in the parking lot and the way Beckett went still when I told him I knew he set up that night. I think about how I let it go. How I filed it and told myself I didn't want to deal with it.
I'm not pushing it off anymore.
"The masked men." I look at Beckett first. His jaw is tight. His eyes are on mine. I already half knew. He confirmed it without confirming it. I move my eyes to Theo and back to Beckett. "Was it you?"
Theo doesn't look away.
"Yes," they say in unison.
The word lands in my chest like I just got hit by another car.
Not because I didn't suspect Beckett. Because they both admitted it directly.
No performance, no management, no careful construction of a version of events designed to land softly.
Just yes. Delivered with the same certainty, Theo delivers everything, like the truth is the only language he's ever been interested in speaking, even when the truth is this.
"You were in my room," I say.
"Yes," Theo says.
I look at Beckett. "And you let him in?"
Something moves in his face. Brief. "Yes."
“You beat Beckett?” I ask.
Theo says, “Yes.”
I look at Cody.
"Why?" I ask.
The room is completely still.
"Why would you break into my room––" I keep my voice even.
I don't know how I'm keeping my voice even.
I am lying in a hospital bed with a broken leg and aching ribs, raw palms, and I am keeping my voice even because if I stop keeping it even, I will not be able to ask the rest of what I need to ask. "And show me those videos."
That catches Cody’s attention.
"Videos," Cody says.
"I know about the videos."
He goes still. "You watched them."
"I watched them."
He nods slowly as he looks at his hands. "Then you know…"
"I know what I saw." I look at him. "I don't know what it means. I don't know why there were so many. I don't know why they were — organized." I pause. "Why were they organized, Cody? Why were there so many?"
He looks up at me.
“OnlyFans," he says.
My heart starts to race at the thought of my boyfriend all over OnlyFans.
"We ran an account," he says. "Me and—" He stops. "It was a business. We made money. A lot of money." He looks at his hands again. "We filmed. Edited. Posted it. We split the revenue."
I blink.
"We," I say.
He doesn't answer.
I look at Theo.
Theo's face is completely still.
"You," I say to Theo. Not a question.
"Yes," he says.
I look at Beckett.
"Were you—"
"No," Beckett says. Immediate. "I wasn't part of that."
I look at the ceiling.
I look at the water stain in the corner of the hospital ceiling, and I breathe through the new pain sitting on my chest. I think about the videos I watched, the women, their faces.
I think about how Theo and Beckett forced me to watch videos of my boyfriend having sex, and how they knew it was deceiving.
They made him out to be a monster, and now I learn that was all for porn?
I thought it was about the women.
I thought the masked men were out to kill him.
It was never just about that.
It was a business.
"How much?" I ask. I want to know how much money was worth destroying our relationship over.
Cody looks up.
"How much money?"
"Adela—"
"How much?"
“Nearly three hundred thousand since we started.”
The number gets stuck in my throat. That’s all profit, and if it’s split between everyone involved, no one is innocent.
"And then what happened?" I say. "Because something happened. Because you—" I look at Cody. "You were put in a coma on my birthday." I don’t look at Beckett because I know his heart. I look at Theo. "Was it you?"
"Yes," Theo says.
I inhale, trying to put these pieces together. "Why?"
The room falls silent. It’s the quietest it's ever been.
Theo looks at me for a long moment. I don’t think he’s conjuring a lie. I think he’s trying to figure out how to say it.
"My sister," he finally says.
My face hardens.
"Cody crossed a line." He exhales. "I told him she was off limits, and he didn't listen."
I look at Cody.
Cody is looking at the window again.
"Your sister," I say to Theo.
"Nessa," he says.
I breathe.
“What did he do to your sister?”
Theo blinks. “I don’t…”
Beckett interjects. “He fucked her and filmed it, uploaded it to the page.”
Cody inhales.
“He broke the rules.”
“Why?” is all I can say.
Theo adds quietly, “He made her fall in love with him.”
“I wanted out,” Cody says. “They… it doesn’t matter. I took it too far.”
“So, what did you do?” I ask Theo, worried about what he’s going to admit.
“I took care of it,” Theo says, leaving it at that.
“So…” I say. “Why am I here?”
Cody exhales. "Nessa Rhodes.”
I look at the ceiling.
I look at the water stain.
I think about the car on a dark road. The waving hands in the passenger seat. The moment of impact that hurt so fucking bad, I will never forget that pain.
"Was she driving?" I ask.
Nobody answers.
Which is its own answer.