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We do. As much as it sucks, I owe it to him to give him some closure. I can’t be with him, and I need to stop giving him mixed signals. If I tell him we can never be together, at least it will hold some accountability for me to stay away from him.
“Yeah, I guess we do,” I answer solemnly, my heart breaking with what has to be done.
“I just—I don’t know what I did to cause you to be so distant lately,” he starts.
“No, Aiden, it’s not—”
A loud crash from downstairs saves me from finishing the lame “it’s not you, it’s me” speech. Everyone’s talking over each other, and Aiden and I move out of my room and into the hallway.
“Is everything okay?” Aiden yells down.
“Chase dropped his glass and it shattered!” Julian yells back up at us. “Where are your paper towels, Amelia?”
“I’ll be right there!” I yell back down.
“Wait,” Aiden says. “We’re not done here.”
“Okay—wait here, I’ll be right back,” I say before running down the stairs.
I’m going to tell him I don’t like him in a romantic way tonight if it kills me. Just do it quick—like ripping off a bandage. Except this pain will probably last much longer and be more intense than some pulled skin and hair, but it has to be done. My life requires sacrifice; this just happens to be one of the biggest ones yet.
We get all the glass and juice cleaned up in under five minutes, all while I’m mentally preparing the speech I have to give to Aiden and reminding myself that under no circumstances am I allowed to cry.
When I get back up to my room, I start talking before I even look at Aiden. “Sorry, Aiden, I just don’t know how I can say this but—”
I immediately stop talking when I look up and see Aiden’s face. It’s a mixture of anger, confusion, disbelief, and betrayal. It’s then that I realize what’s wrong.
My heart stops and my stomach drops. My lungs stop drawing air. The shoebox. My shoebox. It was disguised among the others in my closet, and was one of the ones Charlotte pulled out but didn’t have the time to go through. It’s open on my bed. And Aiden is holding my three previous IDs in his hand: Thea, Isabella, Hailey. All variations of me with slight changes; all with the same age, so it’s not like I can claim they’re fake ones to get me into a club.
He holds up various newspaper articles from the shoebox in one hand, my IDs in the other. “What the fuck, Amelia? Or Hailey or Thea or whatever the fuck your actual name is.”
It’s then that I break my vow not to cry tonight. Tears stream down my face, prompted by the look of betrayal on Aiden’s face. He opened up to me. He told me all of the most personal, deepest secrets that he never tells anyone—never has told anyone. But me.
He trusted me.
And this is him discovering that he placed all of his trust in a person who’s been lying to him the entire time, right to his face, and is the biggest fucking hypocrite to walk the earth.
I can’t think of anything to say to him, not one way of explaining myself—except the only thing that’s running through my head, the one thing I’ve always wanted to hear him say. “Thea,” I say quietly, and he looks at me in disbelief. “My name is Thea.”
He looks back at one of the IDs, presumably my real one, then back at me. He drops everything he’s holding in his hands back into the box and looks at me, with what I can only describe as the visual representation of heartbreak. My entire body hurts, physically and mentally. I hate that this is how Aiden has to find out how fucked up I am—through a fucking shoebox.
“Explain,” he breathes, his eyes narrowed and distrusting, his low voice turning the blood in my veins to ice.
“I—Aiden, I’m so sorry.” I wipe the tears staining my cheek with my hand. “I didn’t mean to—”
I don’t know what to say to make this better, to make this go away, to erase the look of betrayal written all over Aiden’s face. He’s the one person who ever really mattered to me, and now he hates me. I can’t have that. I need him to understand, to be okay with it, to forgive me. I need him to understand more than I need to breathe.
“It’s a long story.”
Our friends yell from downstairs for us to come back and finish the movie, and we glance into the hallway.
“Shorten it.”
Here it is. The thing I’ve never said out loud before. I take a steadying breath and refuse to meet his eyes. “I’m in witness protection. My name is Thea Kennedy. In order to keep myself and the people around me alive and safe from the man hunting me, I have to keep this secret. I couldn’t tell anyone—I can’t tell anyone—because then I’d have to relocate or risk him coming here to hurt me, to hurt the people around me.”
Aiden sinks down on my bed in defeat. He looks at the articles with a newfound understanding.
“I swear, Aiden, everything was still me. I haven’t lied to you about anything except my name.” I move closer to him, unable to stop myself. I need him to believe me, not to hate my guts. “I never meant to hurt you. I never meant to hurt anyone. It was just safer this way.”
