“And I know what she was trying to steal.”
Opening my mouth, I tried to form at least one coherent question.
But Ryan answered before I could speak. “A jewel. There’s a jewel in our vault. It’s supposed to be”—he spread his hands, to indicate the jewel was basketball size—“very valuable. So valuable the council doesn’t even know we haveit.”
My head felt as if it were a bottle of soda that someonehad shaken vigorously. “She broke into your family vault?”
“Yeah, and she went straight for the jewel.” He exhaled as if the words themselves had been fighting to get out of his mouth. “I wanted to tell you as soon as I discovered the tapes—but my father’s monitoring the phone and my emails. I’ve been hanging out downtown for the last three days, hoping you’d show up somewhere and I’d be able to talk to you. Sky, you don’t know how badly I’ve wanted to see you, to know you’re okay, to explain why—”
I barely heard him—my head was buzzing, trying to digest this news about my mom. I’d known she was out on a heist. I simply hadn’t known the target. “So my mother was last seen atyourhouse….” I tried to ignore the panicky butterfly feeling.
Taking a step backward, Ryan waved his hands as if to ward off my words. He actually seemed afraid. Of what? “I don’t know what happened to her. The feed from the security cameras cuts out before she reaches the jewel. It’s just static.”
“Someone must know what happened! She was in your house! Your parents—”
“Don’t ask them. Trust me. You can’t ask them. They won’t talk, and you’ll lose your chance.” His gorgeous eyes were wide. Earnest.Scared,I thought. He got that look when he talked about his parents sometimes. He lived in fear of disappointing them—I often thought it was because he was an only child, their heir, their everything. It was a lot to live up to. But this…it seemed like more.
“What do you mean? Ryan, why are you telling me this? My chance to do what?”
He looked at me and said softly, seriously, “To steal it.”
Staring at him, I felt my eyes fill with tears until he and the alley and all the ridiculously specific recycling bins blurred in front of me. And then I was crying.
I hadn’t cried when Dad broke the news about Mom.
I hadn’t cried when my family’s so-called friends rejected us.
I hadn’t cried when Ryan turned his back on me.
But now, now, I began to sob. Ugly, shoulder-heaving sobs, as if my entire face had become a faucet. I wiped my face furiously on my sleeve. It didn’t help. And then Ryan was there, his arms around me, and I was crying into his shoulder.
I knew I should push him away—he hadn’t apologized or explained or said anything about us. ButMom…He stroked my hair and suddenly I didn’t care about anything that he’d done in the past month. He was here with me now.
His voice muffled by my hair, he said, “I can’t stay. My parents can’t know….But can we talk tonight? Ten o’clock, where we used to meet?”
Crying so hard that I began hiccupping, I nodded.
He kissed the top of my head and murmured something thatsoundedlike he’d said, “I love you, Sky.” But Ryan had never said those words. Drawing away from him, I blinked hard to clear my tears enough to see his expression….
I was too late, though. He fled the alley.
The nice thing about having an emotionally stunted brother with poor communication skills is that he didn’t ask any questions when I returned to Maximus’s shop with an obviously tear-streaked face. He finished his bargaining, and we walked out of the jewelry store without speaking or looking at each other and got into the car. The radio blasted as Liam pulled out of the parking spot and sped away.
Leaning my head against the window, I gazed out at the mountains beyond the shops, restaurants, and condos. This time of year, the chairlifts were motionless, and the trails were mowed paths of yellowed green between clumps of trees. The aspens with their white trunks were stripes against the dark evergreens. A hawk circled high above the pines. Mom loved these mountains in early spring. She said it made her feel as if the Rockies were keeping secrets. In a few weeks, all the flowers and leaves would burst out for everyone to see, but now was the season of secrets, when everything beautiful was hidden under the veneer of leftover winter—and then she’d usually burst into singing “The Sound of Music” at top volume, because she knew it embarrassed my brothers. They’re fun to embarrass. Or they used to be.
A month of moping, of hiding, of shame. I was sick of it.
And Ryan had just offered me a way to end it, if it was true.
Liam took the turns as fast uphill as he did down, and I jerked forward against my seat belt as he spun into our garage and slammed on his brakes. He was out of the car before I could say a word. I followed him into the house but slowed outside the music room.
The remnants of the door had been hauled away, and all that remained were the divots in the frame where the hinges had been. Dad would seal it up again soon, but for now it looked almost like it used to, with the piano sparkling in the sunlight.
It was wrong. All of it, a million times wrong. Selling Mom’s jewelry, stealing the piano, sniping at one another all the time—as if we could erase our shame from everyone’s memory by erasing our memory of her.I won’t do it,I thought.
And that was the moment when a switch inside me flipped.
You know how sometimes in life, you can look back on a moment and know that this,this,this was the instant when everything changed? I felt, in that moment, as if I were outside myself, looking in, and knowing that from here on, everything would be different.
