Chapter 19
“The cruelest punishment is not exposure. It is letting the guilty expose themselves.” The Count of Monte Cristo
LILAH
It’s been a week since our faked scandal.
A week of going to class and basically going back to the way things were.
Which, I’m now realizing, completely sucked.
I eat my stupid healthy food to prove I’m on the right track so when my mom asks she can be proud I’m taking care of myself and I’m not a burden.
I work on my project, knowing my chances of getting into any of Jude’s studios are shot straight to hell, and I default.
I completely freaking default to the person I was before.
I isolate myself just enough, I smile, I act perfect.
But inside I’m dying. Inside I’m crying for help, and I know Charlie is aware; she just doesn’t know how to fix it.
And for the first time in a really long time, I want someone to ask me if I’m okay, and I want it to be the one person who caused the cut. Only he can staunch the bleeding; at least in my head it feels that way.
I grab a glass of wine and sit on the couch. Charlie flips through her magazine. Flip, flip, flip… Yeah, she’s purposefully trying not to say something.
“Is it painful?” I ask.
“Hmmm?” She doesn’t look up.
“Not asking all the questions. It’s a good thing you have Axel to gossip with.”
She makes a noise in the back of her throat.
“Please, for being related he’s a vault.
I ask him anything and he says it’s not his business.
I even asked him about the Dean’s List out of pure curiosity, and he said it was dangerous talking about things that could ruin lives—like it not only exists but that I’m doing too much.
” She flips another page. “I think I have a right to know things, but whatever.” She sighs.
“Still a great kisser.” Flip. “Still awesome in bed.” Flip.
“Amazing in bed.” Flip. “But a vault when it comes to Jude and refuses to gossip.”
“Sorry.” I take another sip. “If anything, though, that should make you feel good that you can trust him.”
She jerks her head up, and something flashes in her eyes before she softens again.
“Yeah…no, I still want the gossip. I’m petty like that.
” Her eyes narrow. “You know, Jude wasn’t mad at you that night, right?
He’s frustrated because for years he thought you were over here living it up, like you got away with murder, pun intended, when really you didn’t even know he still existed.
For one, you took up a lot of headspace, and for two—I said for two?
Anyways, second, he likes you a lot, so it makes things complicated.
” She lets out another heavy sigh. “In this scenario, at least back when things went down between you two you had someone who genuinely cared, you know. It could have been worse.”
Could it have, though? Her tone seems off.
Maybe she’s stressed about Axel—or school.
God knows I’ve been making everything about me lately, which means I’ve been a crappy friend and she’s been my lifeline since freshman year.
She told me she would stalk me if I didn’t immediately room with her and my only other option was a girl who still had night terrors. I’m so thankful I said yes.
“Yeah.” I stare into my wine ignoring the guilt in my chest. Once me and Jude settle things I’ll take Charlie out for a girls’ night.
“Well, that doesn’t make it any easier. I just wish I could help him somehow.
He wants revenge, but you can only do so much with the information you have, you know?
All he knows is I lied. And telling him what they told me to say changes nothing.
There’s court documents for that, and I’m sure he’s read through them all.
I said he shot two guys in self-defense. Two angry robbers.”
“What did they take?” she asks.
“Huh?”
“The robbers. I mean obviously there were intruders, but who were they really? Did you ever ask or find out? Robbers steal things, if they were there and a threat, then they took something or admitted to wanting to take something before getting blasted.” She flips the page again.
“So, I think the question would be, what were they after?”
“My dad said he was protecting me from the details.” I frowned. “I mean as much as he could. Since I was a minor, they had a closed written testimony. I said what I saw and that was it. It sounds more sinister than it actually was. I was coached and then handed a pen.”
She smirks and looks up at me; I know that expression, it’s are you dumb? “And you just trusted your dad to say ‘yo, good job, he won’t get hard time’?”
I frown as the truth of her words hits one by one.
“I mean he had no reason to lie, and I was protecting both him and Jude’s dad.
They were adults, obviously. A minor with a firearm is one thing, especially on his own property.
If I said my dad had a gun on someone else’s property, he would have gone to prison for a long time.
If Jude’s father confessed it was him, all eyes would be on him and all he said was that if people dug up his ghosts it would kill Jude and ruin any chances I had of seeing him again. ”
“Does Jude know this?” she prods. “Because I feel like he should know this…”
“Does it matter?”
“Um, yes it matters. God you’re like every bad TV show I’ve ever seen where the communication sucks and if only they’d talk things would be fine. Tell him. Tell him everything. Worst case scenario it does nothing, best case scenario you bang.”
“Ahh.” I nod. “Full circle. Nice.”
She frowns a bit and says. “What about your mom? Something tells me she’s keeping secrets too because it would be strange for her to just be complacent in this, right?
Is she the type to just sit back and take it?
And even then, you said all of your need for perfection came from her, so she’s either the opposite of perfect, or she drives you because she needs to control just one thing.
” She gives an exaggerated shudder. “God, I should have majored in psych.”
“Yeah.” I stare down at my lap. “You should have. You know everything about me anyways. I’m convinced I need to be perfect in order to look at the piece of paper with those perfect grades and perfect eating habits and go ‘See? You aren’t about to crash out like your mom, gold star.
’” I grimace. “She’s just…weak. I think that’s the best way to describe her. ”
“And silent during a murder investigation, don’t forget that part.” Charlie adds. “Well, she seems pretty silent in all of this.”
I think about how Dad seems to be living his best life while Mom suffers. “She was never the same after Jude’s alleged death while Dad just moved on.”
“Which probably begs the question…why?”
“Me,” I admit as a buttload of guilt settles over me. “Why else would I try to be perfect in every single way? I went vegan for her because she was worried about my health, and I cried over a French fry once I found out Jude died, so she said fast food was a no, and well, here we are.”
“Have you mentioned it to her? Before?”
I shake my head.
She grabs my phone and slams it onto the couch. “Call her. Now. Get answers. Then go get your man.”
“He’s not my man,” I whisper.
“He is your man, plus he’s still listening.”
“What?”
“To your voice. To the lives you change when you read. Every night. He listens in his room. Not creepily, but like he misses the sound of your voice.”
Tears prick behind my eyelids. “I miss him too.”
“Okay then, fix it, no more moping or you really won’t graduate.”
She’s not wrong.
“Fine.” I grab the phone, take a deep breath, walk into my room, then sit down and call my mom.
It rings once, twice, three times, and finally on the fourth a garbled hello answers on the other end. She clears her throat. “Baby? You okay?”
“Yeah.” More tears well in my eyes. “I mean no. I guess I could be better.”
She snorts. “You never admit when you’re upset, so this must be bad, let me just pour a drink.”
Ah, the answer to everything. My stomach immediately sinks.
“Been drinking lots of water recently.”
Sure she has. Too bad it tastes like vodka.
“Alright, what’s going on?”
“You um, remember Jude?”
She’s so silent I think the line’s gone dead.
“Mom?”
“Yeah, yeah, I remember him. What that poor boy went through, what his father put him through. I never really cared for that family, but his mom did the best she could in trying to protect him. Going as far as to make up those bad grades to get him out of the house when shipments came in.”
“Shipments?”
Her heavy sigh sounds like static on the line.
“Oh honey, you were too young at the time. Jude’s father ran some very unsavory businesses.
One night, his mom found something tied to Brighton University, to some faculty members: bribes, drug deals, it went deep.
Politicians were involved, and it all led back to Jude’s dad. ”
The Dean’s List. I’d bet money on it. That’s what she’s talking about. But it was something far worse than some TikTok trend or rumor. It involved livelihoods, lives, futures.
“We let him come to our house to protect him as much as we could from his father’s influence.
But as he got older he got smarter, of course, and started suspecting things weren’t all right.
His mom was going to tell him that year what was going on, she was going to file for divorce and everything…
” She sighs, lighter this time. “I’ll never forget the day she told me.
It was the first time I saw an honest to God smile on that woman’s face.
She sounded like she had hope for the first time in her life. ”
My stomach sinks. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?
Her sigh is heavy again, a sip, another sip.
“At the time, your dad said it wasn’t our business.
He was in tight with Edward Hale. He convinced me it would be our necks if we said anything, and I was already pissing him off by taking Jude in all those nights.
It was easy to blame your friendship, but I know it made your dad uncomfortable.
Before his job at the university he would do odd jobs for Edward.
You don’t remember, but your dad had a hell of a job getting hired on full time at the university.
He was always an adjunct professor, but others had better degrees, more money, more connections than us. ”
I frown. “Crazy timing then, the sudden move out of town, him getting a job at Brighton.”
“It wasn’t a coincidence. Edward wrote your dad a letter and your dad got the job offer the very next day.
I was so thankful to get you away from Jude, from his family and their influence…
I never asked questions. Had I known it would traumatize you the way it did and break up our family I would have made a different choice, but hindsight’s twenty-twenty, right?
” Another sigh, another sip. “And we were in so much debt that the extra money to move helped.”
“The extra money?”
“Yeah, the university even gave us an extra ten grand when we told them we couldn’t move out here that fast.” She chuckles, but it sounds sad. “I’ve never been more thankful.”
My stomach sinks to the floor. The ten grand that Jude thought we took as hush money. The lies his dad told him to keep him close—no, not just that, but to keep him angry at me, to keep him from knowing the truth.
And that’s when it hits me.
They did this on purpose so Jude would never find out.
So Jude would never discover what his mom had: The Dean’s List. The only question is, where the hell is it if she’s no longer here. And did he kill her for it?
We need it now more than ever. At least one thing is perfectly clear, neither of our dads are in charge of it. There’s someone else behind the scenes, and unless his mom isn’t really dead, it’s the person who currently has the list.
So, we’re back to square one.
Exposing whoever’s behind it or doing something scandalous enough to gain notice, we need it to bring him down.
“Honey?” Mom suddenly sounds tired or maybe it’s just my own exhaustion creeping in. “You still there?”
“Yeah.” I bite down on my lower lip. “I’m here.”
“What made you call and bring all that back up?”
“He’s here,” I say. “Jude, at my university.”
“Alive?”
“Did you know?” I hope she didn’t. I hope she didn’t just keep this from me too. “That he was alive this whole time?”
“Honey, some things are meant to stay buried, believe me I have more ghosts than I’d care to admit. I knew getting you far away from that boy was the smartest thing we could do. His family won’t stop. It’s my job to keep you safe, even his mom knew that before she died.”
“So you did,” I whisper. “You saw me suffering, and you still said nothing?”
“You were fine!” She raises her voice so much I pull the phone from my ear. “You never cried, you studied harder, and you forgot all about him.”
But I didn’t.
I never forgot him.
I never forgot his smell.
The feel of him.
“I faked it,” I admit. “All of it. I was heartbroken. I was just afraid if I added more stress to your lives, I’d lose you guys too.
Then you got divorced, and everything started falling apart around me.
The only thing I could control was my stupid diet and behavior.
So I did. I controlled what I did to make you happy while I was slowly dying inside! ”
Now look at her.
Look at us.
Dad included.
“Lilah—”
“I gotta go.” I end the call and toss the phone onto my bed then wipe the tears from my eyes with shaking hands. I don’t need fake apologies from my mom or sad looks from my dad.
I need Jude.