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Aspen said nothing. I mean, what could she say? She was obviously rendered speechless, and when her focus veered over to me, I avoided eye contact like I could through a goddamn phone.
“Thatcher, what is he talking about?” she asked me, and I turned back just in time to see surprise register on her captor’s face. It read there, just briefly before his head tipped back.
“You didn’t tell her,” he stated, but there was no question in his voice. He rubbed the shadow on his face. “You murdered my brother… the man who was going to be her stepfather, and you never told her.”
The horror on Aspen’s face elevated. Her cheeks filled with so much red, and I lost it. I gripped my phone. “Stop, man?—”
“What kind of sick fucked-up kid does some shit like that,” the guy gritted, and the blood pounded all up in my head. It made me dizzy, nauseous, and I had to use the wall of the precinct to stay upright. The fucker did look familiar to me. So goddamn familiar. The guy’s eyes narrowed. “I never did find you. I didn’t, and even though I told the cops about some snot-nose kid leaving the scene, they didn’t believe me. I had no proof. Told me I was fucked up after everything that happened to Joe and seeing shit.”
Joe…
Even the name made my world tilt, spin like I was on some fucked-up Ferris wheel and couldn’t get off.
I was holding on to the wall now, and from some far-off place, I could hear Aspen.
She was pleading.
“Thatcher, what’s he—” Her voice broke, and I dared to glance up. Something that made my nausea shift into overdrive was the expression that had overtaken her beautiful face.
A labored swallow passed through the column of Aspen’s throat, and when her eyes crinkled, cringing, I thought I’d vomit. The way she looked at me… so much uncertainty in her eyes. Terror backed it, and that was what made the sickness swirl. Terror was only a click away from something else. It was so close to fear, and that was a way I never wanted to see her look at me again. When Aspen came back into my life, I hadn’t given a shit about that. But now was different. Now, the way she looked at me had me gripping the wall to the point of breaking the skin on my hands.
Aspen cringed again. “Thatcher, what is he talking about? Joe? My mom’s fiancé, Joe?”
He had been her mom’s fiancé, but he’d also been my coach. He’d coached my friends and me for three summers at football camp. Three before he’d died and left this world just a little bit better. His absence from this earth had left the planet purer.
Cleansed.
There was nothing bad about the fact that that man was gone. There were absolutely zero things bad about that, but how did I say that to the girl looking at me through a phone screen? The one waiting to hear something, anything from me that would stamp out this guy’s accusations. I saw Aspen and her mother back then. They’d visited Coach for part of the summer and stayed with him, a new almost family. The guy had brightened their world, and anyone could have seen that.
Anyone could have seen the lie.
Coach had been real good at creating bullshit, a persona that he was a good person, and so many people had believed that shit. He’d been good at that shit. My throat jumped. “Aspen…”
I couldn’t finish. Once more, I didn’t know what to say, and Aspen blinked. She did just once before that terror on her face clicked over to the next level. That fear finally danced in her brown eyes.
“Thatcher, tell me what he’s saying isn’t true. Thatcher…” Her lip trembled, quivering. “Thatcher, tell me he’s lying. You were nowhere near that fire Joe died in. You weren’t.”
Each word she said was cracked, fractured, and honestly, the sentence was hard to make out. Each word she said was so light. It was timid when she wasn’t. Aspen Davis was the girl who told me off. My girl.
She wasn’t looking like that girl when I finally managed to make eye contact with her again. I’d been looking at the ground and trying to do anything but upchuck my lack of breakfast. I hadn’t eaten anything this morning, but I felt like I’d had a goddamn buffet with the way my stomach lurched.
Aspen shook her head. “Thatcher?—”
“He can’t tell you that.” The man beside her, the one with the gun, stared at me coldly through the screen. He spoke to her, but he only looked at me. “He can’t because he did it, and now, he’s going to tell the world what he did. I found you now, boy, and you’re going to own up to what you did to my brother.”
He hadn’t been looking for me that well. After all, I was the kid who’d taken Aspen for most of that summer. I’d held her captive, but he obviously didn’t know about that or didn’t know it was me who’d done that. The fire had happened later that year, but not much later.
I’d made sure of that.
“Thatcher…”
My eyes closed, Aspen’s voice too much for me. I could literally hear the emotion in it. Like she was on the cusp of crying and doing everything she could to hold it back.
“Thatcher, please tell me it’s not true,” she continued, her voice strained. “Thatcher, you didn’t have anything to do with that fire. Tell me.”
Like Coach’s brother said, I couldn’t. I gazed up. “Sorry, snowflake.”
It was real fear now, real horror on her lovely face. The back of her head touched the bed. She looked like she was going to spiral, and my apology, well, that was only for her. It was for this reaction only because I couldn’t apologize for what I’d done. Not really.
