Chapter 60 Adela #2
"Theo's sister was driving the car that hit me," I say it out loud, not because I need confirmation, but because I need to hear the shape of it. "She was driving, and you were in the car." I look at Beckett. At Theo. "Both of you."
"We were trying to stop her," Beckett says. His voice different from usual — stripped of the steadiness, something raw underneath. "She got a call from Cody that night. He said something to her and she—" He stops.
I look at Cody.
Cody closes his eyes.
"What did you say to her?" I say.
He doesn't answer.
"Cody." My voice breaks on his name for the first time. Just slightly. He’s the one I love the most in this room. I trusted him for years. And I find all of this out while I’m in a hospital room on what feels like my deathbed. "What did you say to Nessa?"
He opens his eyes and looks at me.
And he tells me.
Every word. What he said to her on the phone in a car outside a lake house where he'd taken me.
How he told her she was nobody. How he told her she was leverage.
How he said the words that sent her into a car in the dark, going too fast on a road I happened to be walking on.
How he knew that I fucked Beckett in my dorm because he saw him leaving, and he sent a photo of me tied up to lure him out.
“It was never meant to hurt you. I wanted to kill them for messing with you.”
I scoff, trying to process everything being said.
Cody used Theo's sister.
Theo put Cody in a coma.
Beckett knew what he let into my dorm that night.
The library was never accidental.
The man who read to me knew who I was before I knew who he was.
The man I loved was filming himself having sex for money and calling it business.
The man who tied me to a chair, threatened me, and made me terrified for my life is the same man who bought me a book with a fake dedication and licked my tears from my face.
The girl who hit me was a sister trying to destroy the thing she blamed for destroying her.
I don't cry.
I want to.
The pressure is behind my eyes, in my throat, and sitting on my chest alongside the physical pain.
But I don't cry because I have run out of the thing crying requires, like a fire that has burned through everything available and gone out, not because it was extinguished, but because there was nothing left to consume.
I look at the three of them.
At Cody by the window with his eyes red and his jaw tight.
At Beckett at the foot of my bed with his elbows on his knees.
At Theo in the chair with the book in his hands.
I look at Theo.
At the book.
Something occurs to me.
"Give me the book," I say.
He looks at me and holds it out. I take it, feeling every muscle I move ache.
I open it, and something falls out.
I move the book to look at what it is.
It’s my pink Swarovski pendant on its delicate chain.
I look at it for a long time.
Then I look at Theo.
He's already looking at me.
He doesn't say anything. He just meets my eyes and lets me have it — the full weight of what it means, that he took it, that he kept it, that he has been carrying it for quite a while.
I pick it up and hold it in my palm.
And I feel it.
Not the pendant. Not the cold of the chain or the weight of the crystal. I feel the months of it. Every single morning, I looked for it and couldn't find it. Every time I convinced myself I'd misplaced it, lost it, left it somewhere careless. I grieved this. I genuinely grieved this.
I look at the window at the gray Seattle sky doing what it always does, and I think about the girl I was just three months ago.
She was so certain. She loved so cleanly.
She had a best friend, a boyfriend, and a life that made sense from every angle, and she thought she understood what it meant to be loved.
She didn't know anything.
I open my hand.
I look at the pendant one more time. At the chain pooled in my palm, and then I set it down on the hospital tray.
I don't want to hold it anymore.
I don't want to hold any of it anymore.
I look at Cody first.
He's already watching me. He's been watching me the whole time with those red eyes and that open face — the most honest I've ever seen him, the most unguarded, and isn't that the cruelest thing?
That I get the real version of him now. After everything.
After all of it. Now he shows me something true.
"Get out," I say.
His face changes. "Adela—"
"Get out of this room." My voice doesn't shake. I don't know how it doesn't shake when my heart is breaking, but it doesn't. "I need you to get out."
"Baby, just listen—"
"Don't." The word comes out sharp enough that he stops. "Don't call me that. Don't call me anything." I look at him, and I feel two years of love sitting in my chest next to two years of lies, and I cannot tell them apart anymore, and that might be the most devastating thing of all. "Please leave."
He looks at me for a long moment.
Then he looks at the floor.
He picks up his jacket.
He walks to the door and stops with his hand on the frame. He turns back and opens his mouth. I shake my head once. He nods and closes it as he leaves.
I look at Beckett.
He's already standing.
He knew before I looked at him. Beckett has always been the one who reads rooms, who understands what's coming before it arrives, who shows up already knowing what's needed. That quality that I thought meant he cared.
Maybe he did care.
It doesn't matter anymore.
"Beck," I say.
"I know," he says quietly.
"I can't look at you right now."
He nods. Once. He doesn't perform anything — no wounded expression, no argument, no last attempt to say something that will make it land differently. He nods, picks up his jacket, and looks at me one time with something in his face that I don't have the energy to decode.
He goes.
The door closes.
I look at Theo.
He hasn't moved.
He's sitting in the chair with the book in his hands, and he's looking at me, and he looks — I don't know what he looks like.
I have spent weeks trying to read his face, but I have never been able to fully.
I cannot do it now either, and that's the issue.
Maybe that's always been the thing. I fell for a face I could never fully read, and I told myself that was depth, and it was just distance.
He kept my pendant from the beginning.
He sat across from me in a library and let me think I was safe.
"Theo." His name in my mouth feels different now. Everything feels different now. "Take the book."
He looks at it in his hands.
"Take it and go."
He looks at me.
For a long moment, he looks at me, and I look back.
I think about the park and the strawberries and the dedication he made up and the way he said this isn't a mistake, you'll see with such complete certainty, like he could see further down the road than I could and had already checked what was there.
He couldn't see this.
Or maybe he could.
Either way, it hurts.
"Go," I say.
He stands.
He picks up the pendant from my tray, and I open my mouth to tell him to leave it, but then I close it because I don't want it either. Not right now. Not tonight. Tonight, it is just the thing that undid me, and I don't want it in this room.
He holds it in his closed fist.
He walks to the door.
He stops.
He doesn't turn around. He stands there with his back to me and his hand on the door and I watch his shoulders.
He doesn't say anything.
He goes.
The door closes for the third time, and the room is quiet.
I can't breathe right.
Not because of my leg or my ribs or anything, they fixed in surgery.
Something else. Something that doesn't show up on a scan.
It's sitting in the center of my chest, and it's heavy in a way I've never felt heavy before.
I keep waiting for it to shift, and it doesn't shift. It just sits there and presses.
They gutted me.
That's the only word for it. Not hurt. Not betrayed.
Gutted. Like everything that was inside me — every feeling I trusted, every moment I thought was real, every time I felt safe or chosen or seen — was never mine to begin with.
It was theirs. They built it, they held it, and they let me think I found it.
And I am lying in this hospital bed with a body full of damage and a chest full of something I don't have a word for yet, and I realize that this is what it feels like. This weight. This specific can't-breathe, can't-cry, can't-do-anything-but-stare-at-the-ceiling feeling.
This is what it feels like to be destroyed.
They took everything from me.