Page 29 of The Next Lie

Delia looks back at me. “Did you know?”

I hold her gaze.

Her laugh is small and awful. “Of course you did.”

“I knew she lived.”

Her eyes flash. “For how long?”

“Since that night.”

For a second, all the blood leaves her face.

Then she crosses the room and slaps me.

It is a good slap. Clean. Hard enough to turn my head.

I let it.

She looks more shocked by that than by the sound of her palm cracking across my face.

“You knew,” she says. “You knew she was alive this whole time.”

“Yes.”

“And you never told me.”

“No.”

Her hand shakes at her side. She curls it into a fist and uncurls it again. “Why?”

Because you were watched.

Because the walls around you had ears and teeth.

Because grief made you useful to them, and hope would have made you dangerous.

Because I was a coward.

None of those answers are clean enough to hand her.

“She was safer dead,” I say. “You both were.”

Delia recoils as if I slapped her back.

“And she…she thought I was dead. Do you even hear yourself?”

“Every day.”

“No. You don’t.” Her voice cracks, then flattens around the fracture. “You do not get to decide that. You do not get to stand here and tell me that my sister was safer dead when I spent fifteen years thinking she was in the ground.”

“She was never in the ground.”

“Well, to me, she was! We both were!”

I nod once, suddenly exhausted. That’s the worst thing I can do, apparently. Delia’s face twists.

“Don’t…just fucking…agree with me! That doesn’t make it right!”