45. Emmy
Liam makes dinner, and I offer minimal help. I can be trusted with chopping and not much else.
“I worry when you’re this quiet,” he says, looking over his shoulder at me from the stove. “Especially when you’ve got a knife in your hands.”
“I’m not really in the mood to kill Frank right now if that’s your concern,” I reply. “Check back just before five in the morning, however.”
“I’m more worried about your mom. Or Beverly.”
I release a quiet, sad laugh. “Yeah, that makes more sense.”
Liam’s asked me no fewer than ten times how I’m doing since we left Beverly’s apartment, and I keep telling him I’m fine. The truth is both better and worse than I could have hoped: my dad did some terrible things, but it’s also pretty clear he loved me, and that matters most. He’s probably dead, but I’d mostly assumed that already. My mother did many terrible things to me—keeping me in the dark the least of them—but at least now there’s a slight reason for the way she hated me. She had a baby to save a marriage that wasn’t especially good in the first place, and that baby ended up looking very much like the daughter his mistress had had two weeks prior. And then those girls met in kindergarten and became best friends, running all over town telling everyone they were twins.
I wonder how many goddamn people in Elliott Springs suspected the truth.
“Are you going to talk to your mom about it?” he asks.
My jaw grinds. My mother knew a great deal of the shit that was happening at school and she never said a word to me. She allowed me to believe I was the problem when she should have told me why it was happening and placed me somewhere away from Bradley at the very least. I mean, it probably had almost nothing to do with my weight at all. I’ll never forgive her for letting me believe it was, but I was already never going to forgive her before all this came to light. “I’m not sure there’s much of a point. She’ll just spend the whole conversation finding a way to blame me for how things went down and defending her bad decisions.”
“What about Bradley?”
Ugh. That’s more complicated. Looking back, I can see how every one of my successes must have needled her. My grades, my placement test scores, the schools I got into. Academically, I did better and better while she started to slide precipitously from age ten onward. I was winning awards; I was valedictorian. I’m guessing she blamed it entirely on the fact that we were living off money that should have been partly hers.
But could any of that make up for the way she tortured me?
“Between the shit she did and the shit my mother said, they pretty much broke me,” I finally reply. “No matter what her life was like after my dad left, I don’t see myself letting it go.”
“Did you know that lead becomes two hundred times stronger under pressure?” he asks out of nowhere.
I frown. “You’re incredibly bad at changing the subject.”
He pulls the knife from my hands and turns me toward the mirror. “I’m not changing the subject. I’m telling you to look at yourself and realize that no one broke you. You’re one of the strongest people I know, and a lot of that is because of what you went through. How much of yourself would you give away to have not gone through it all?”
I sigh. “A lot. I’d give away a lot.”
“I know. I’m working on that.” He presses a kiss to the top of my head and wraps his arms around me, still holding my gaze in the mirror. “Because I wouldn’t want you to give away a single goddamn thing.”
* * *
I don’t talkto Bradley. I don’t talk to my mom. I’m finishing up the last few contracts on Main Street and finalizing my presentation for the Lucas Hall hearing next week, and I’m busy.
When Liam points out that I’m not too busy to take Snowflake on long walks, cook dinner with him, and have sex…I tell him I’m thinking I’ll cut back on all those things too.
That shuts him right up.
“Come on, Em,” he groans, two nights before the hearing on Lucas Hall. “You’ve done enough.”
“No, I haven’t. And neither have you. Don’t you want to work on it a little?”
“Nope,” he says, kicking back on the couch, “and yours is fine too. Come watch something with me.”
“Mine isn’t fine and neither is yours. Liam…you’ve got to do something. At least show them the history of the building. Remind them what they’re giving up.”
He hitches a shoulder. “There’s no point. Face it, Em. You’ve won.”
I slap a hand to my forehead. “Since when are you such a quitter? I haven’t won. There are a million things you could do. You’re just not doing them.”
His smile is gentle. “Em, I’m not a quitter. I’m a realist. And what I want most right now is to enjoy these last nights with you because I don’t know how many more of them I’m going to get.”
Something flips over in my stomach—a grief so intense I feel sick from it. What will I have left when this is done? I’ll have everything I thought I wanted, and nothing I actually want.
I close my laptop and sit by his side.
“You could stop me, you know.” I stare straight ahead at the television, seeing nothing. “Easily. All you have to do is get it designated as a historic landmark.”
“I doubt there’s time for that at this point.” He reaches for the remote. “Okay, so there’s this movie about a female vigilante who—”
“You could get an injunction.” I swallow. I can’t believe I’m doing this. “It would keep the council from deciding anything while it was under consideration. Inspired Building fudged some of the reports to keep it from going before the historic preservation committee. You could argue that the reports were wrong.”
He presses his lips to the top of my head. “I’m still not going to, Em. This is what you want, and if you take anything from your time here, I want it to be that one person in Elliott Springs loved you enough to put you first.”
I freeze. He’s just said, more or less, that he loves me. He’s just said that he’s not stopping me, though he could. He worked on this for two years and now, on behalf of a girl he still doesn’t know all that well, he’s giving up his dreams.
When she’s the one who sabotaged those dreams in the first place.
My throat is clogged. It’s bullshit that he’s not going to fight me on this. It’s bullshit that he’s giving up what he wanted so damn badly just because he wants my happiness more than his own.
Only one of us can win, so it’s going to be me. Isn’t that what I told myself? And I said it assuming that Liam was thinking the same thing. But he wasn’t. Liam was thinking, “Only one of us can win, so I want it to be her.”
And it hurts.
“I have to go,” I whisper, rising.
“Now?” he asks.
I nod quickly. “I’ll be back.”
I grab my keys and phone and walk out while he’s still asking questions. And then I march toward the town while tears run down my face.
It hurts that he cares this much. It hurts that he’s not getting what he wants, that a building he loves is going to be destroyed because I want revenge—revenge on a bunch of former teenage idiots who had issues of their own, who probably don’t even care all that much about Lucas Hall. Not the way Liam does.
I find myself on Main Street. I don’t know why I’ve walked here—nothing but the diner’s even open this late, and it’s not as if I’d want someone to see me crying anyway.
The street is quiet and empty and I wish it were otherwise. Being in New York City was lonelier in a way—I could go through an entire day without ever speaking to another person—but I’ve never felt alone there the way I do now.
There is nowhere I deserve to go and no one I deserve to speak to, and that breaks my heart. Liam breaks my heart. Doesn’t he realize he could do so much better than me? How could he possibly care so much when I’ve done nothing but show him I’m unworthy of it?
“Emmy? Are you all right?”
Jeannie is standing in the alley next to the diner, smoking a cigarette.
Instead of the forced smile I’d planned to offer her, a sob emerges instead. “No,” I reply. “Not really.”
She throws the cigarette on the ground and stamps it out with her foot. “Oh, hon,” she says, throwing her arms around me. “What happened?”
“I sort of had a fight,” I reply, “with Liam.”
Her eyes widen. “With Liam? Didn’t know he had it in him.”
I choke on a weeping laugh. “You didn’t know he had it in him to fight? After what he did to Paul?”
“I didn’t know he had it in him to fight with you,” she amends.
My eyes close, and two large tears slide down my face. “He doesn’t,” I reply. “That’s what we fought about. He isn’t going to present his plan to save Lucas Hall on Friday. At all. He said it matters more to him that I get what I want.”
I press my hands to my face and cry, large, gasping sobs. I’m humiliated to be seen like this, but I can’t seem to help it.
“I don’t understand,” she says. “I think it’s sort of sweet.”
“I don’t want him to give up his dream,” I reply. “I don’t want to win by default. I wanted to win because I had the best plan. I think maybe beating him felt more impartial. If he’s not even going to try though…”
If he’s not even going to try, then he’s made a sacrifice on my behalf. Liam, who’s done nothing but give and wait for me, is just going to keep on giving, and I’m going to keep on taking.
“You’re tired, Emmy,” she says gently. “I have a spare room if you need a place to stay.”
I shake my head, no, but the question just makes me cry harder. I’ve never done anything to deserve her kindness or her care, yet she’s offering it to me anyway. Liam did, too, and I repaid him by stealing his dream away from him.
“Eventually he’ll hate me for it,” I whisper. “He’ll come to his senses, and then he won’t forgive me.”
She tips my chin up with her index finger, forcing me to meet her eye. “Emmy, that boy’s been crazy about you, as far as I can tell, for months now. There will never be a time when he doesn’t find a way to forgive you. You’ve just got to figure out how you’ll forgive yourself.”
I swallow. Could she be right? Is this a me problem—not a Liam one? I’m not sure, but I know I won’t find the answer crying here. “Thanks, Jeannie. I guess maybe I’ll head home.”
She smiles. “I think that would be wise.”
As I walk up the hill to Liam’s house, Jeannie’s words play over and over again in my head until I finally hear the truth in them.
She was right. The issue was never with Liam. He’s forgiven every shitty thing I’ve ever done, and he’ll forgive this one too.
This issue is me. And I won’t be able to forgive myself if I’m the reason he gave up his dream.
Only one of us can win, and if that’s the case…it needs to be him.
Even if it means blowing up everything I’d planned.