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“Tori,” I choke out her name, but she doesn’t hear me. She’s in the memory, too deep to crawl out.
“Even after all of that, I still wasn’t enough for him. He’d fuck anyone he wanted, and after a while, he stopped trying to hide it. He’d separated me from all of my friends. He’d tell people lies about me to keep them away, or make it look like he was the victim. He discredited me in the eyes of everyone I knew so I could never talk to anyone. I genuinely felt like I’d lost my mind, and I was so fucking broken I couldn’t see a way out. I was addicted to him. To the cycle. And I know how unbelievable that sounds, but until you’ve been in it, you can’t understand it.”
She looks up at me then, her expression frozen in time as she recounts the rest of her story.
“We were still together when he met Bianca. At that point, I already knew he was bored with me. He’d destroyed me, and I wasn’t fun to play with anymore. When he met her, she was new and different. She wasn’t impressed by all of his money or his ego or the way everyone around him seemed to worship him. And I think that was what drove him so crazy. He’d never had someone challenge him like that. He obsessed over her, and all I could do was sit back and watch as it happened. I knew he was done with me. But when he dumped me, it was like someone flipped a switch in him. He went from controlling every aspect of my life to pretending I didn’t exist because all he cared about was getting her. The fucked-up thing was whenever he needed to get laid, he’d come back to me because she wouldn’t give it up to him. He’d tell me what a bitch she was and how horrible she treated him, and it finally made me realize it was exactly what he did to me.”
I stare at the table, recalling the way Adam told me he wasn’t fucking around on Bianca. How he told me he’d taken her virginity, and she’d sworn it wasn’t true, but I didn’t believe her. While the truth unravels, a slow-burning anger simmers beneath my skin as I consider that everything Tori’s telling me makes perfect sense, but the things Adam said never did. And I couldn’t see it because I was too blinded by my fucking loyalty to a brother I didn’t even know.
“That night when you first came back home, I’d made the decision,” Tori says. “I was done with him for good. I didn’t want to be his table scraps anymore. Then you saw me at the party, and I’ll admit, I always had a little crush on you. When you showed an interest in me, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to hurt him. To make him jealous and let him know what it felt like. He saw us together, and I knew he was pissed. But I never could have imagined—"
She brings a trembling hand to her mouth, and I’m hesitant to hear what she has to say next because I know there’s no coming back from it.
“The next night, he came for me,” she rasps. “He’d never been so violent. I honestly thought he was going to kill me. He kept choking me over and over until I passed out. And then, he took what he wanted to prove his point. When I fought, he slammed my face into the floor and punched me in the back of the head. If it wasn’t for someone stumbling into the house, I don’t know if I would have made it out of there. I didn’t even think. I just ran, and that’s when I saw you in the pool house.”
“I’m sorry, Tori.”
I drag my hands over my face and try to think. Breathe. Find something to say, but what is there? It’s too little, too fucking late. I want to punch a hole in the wall. I want to resurrect Adam just so I can beat his goddamn face in. Even as I think about it, guilt bears down on me because he’s dead, and I’ve been grieving his loss for so long. I’ve been angry at the injustice of his murder. I contorted his memory into something shiny and perfect to remember him by, vowing to avenge him. And now, with one conversation, it’s all been swept away as I realize I never even knew him.
“Fucking Christ,” I growl. “I didn’t know. I swear I didn’t. I would have done something if I had. I need you to know that.”
“He didn’t want you to know,” Tori replies softly. “He had a way of keeping that part of him separate from everyone else. We can’t go back and change it now, but as strange as it might sound, one good thing came out of it.”
