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I’d told myself that I could make things right here, that I could heal this place for him, and instead, I’ve let it break him wide open.
My eyes are hot with tears as I say, “I’m sorry. This is all my fault.”
He shakes his head, hair tickling my chin. “Don’t say that,” he replies, voice thick, and finally his hands drop from his head, coming to rest on my ribs for a moment before he lifts his head.
I let him go, sitting back on my heels and looking up at him. His face, his beautiful face that I’ve loved from the first time I saw him, is anguished, tears wetting his cheeks, and there’s a twisting pain in my chest that makes me understand why people say a heart breaks. That’s what it feels like now, and I know how much I must love him because if I could take this away from him, if I could feel whatever agony is inside of him so that he wouldn’t have to, I would.
“It brought it all back, didn’t it?” I ask, stroking his calf. “Seeing Nelle. You can tell me, Cam. You can tell me anything. You know that, right?”
He’s staring somewhere over my shoulder, his hands claspedin front of him, knuckles white. I can see where he’s picked at his cuticles, the skin raw, and I touch one of those red places gently, once again wishing I could take the pain he’s feeling and hold it inside of me instead.
“I know things with you and Ruby were complicated,” I say, my voice low and gentle, like I’m talking to a wounded animal. That’s what he reminds me of right now, jittery and tense, his eyes haunted. “But still. It must have been such a shock, finding her like—”
Cam gets up so fast that I rock back in surprise, almost knocked over by his long legs as he strides away from me, one hand on his hip, the other rubbing his mouth.
He stands there in the middle of the room, and something starts to go cold inside me, sinking into my veins, my heart.
“It wasn’t a shock. Finding her,” he says as I sit there on the plush carpet of Ruby’s bedroom and wait for him to say what my sick stomach and dazed mind somehow already know.
“I knew she was dead when I opened the door,” he goes on, and he turns, our gazes meeting, and I want to tell him to stop there, not to say the next part, the part that he won’t be able to take back, the part I won’t be able to unhear.
“I knew. Because I killed her.”
CHAPTER FIFTEENCamden
“I killed her.”
The words hang in the air, words I’ve never said out loud before. You’d imagine it would feel good, getting something like that off your chest, even if you know it’s about to ruin your fucking life.
But it doesn’t feel like anything. It’s just a fact, one I’ve tried to run from, though I’ve now learned you can’t run from these kinds of things.
They always catch you in the end.
Jules is still sitting on the floor, her legs twisted to one side, her eyes wide in a pale face. Her legs and feet are bare, her toenails turquoise. I flash back to her painting them in the bathroom of our little house in Golden, singing softly to herself as I lay in our bed and watched her, warmth in my chest, contentment in my bones.
How fucking stupid I was, thinking I could have that forever.
“I, uh. I’d come back from college. I was going to UNC then, but I’d already started the paperwork to transfer. Do you know why I picked CSU San Bernardino?”
She shakes her head, and I rub the back of my neck, a humorless laugh harsh in my throat. “Neither did I. I just searched ‘colleges in California,’ and told myself I’d choose one at random. It didn’t matter where, just so long as it put the whole country between me and this place. Because I knew by then. I knew what Ashby House did to people. How it twisted them. It’s not just the money. I mean, the money is part of it, but it’s more than that. It’s what happens when you live in a place that never expects you to… well, leave, I guess. To go out in the world and actually do something with your life. Ruby, her family? They might as well be gods here. It’s why they all stay. They’re so used to everyone knowing who they are, to their last name opening doors and greasing wheels, and…”
I blow out a shaky breath. These secrets have been stuck inside me for so long, and now they’re all tumbling out. “When nothing has ever been hard for you. When you’ve never had to do the normal shit everyone else does to get through their day, you start thinking maybe youaren’ta normal person. Maybe youarebetter. Which means you can do what you want. Anything you want.”
Jules hasn’t moved, but I can see her chest moving up and down, her lips parted, and I wish there were some way to make her understand, to pour all these experiences into her head, all the years of living in this house. To make her see how confusing it was to be simultaneously the coddled Golden Boy and the outsider, the orphan.
“Ruby used to say that to me,” I continue. “‘You’re a McTavish now, Camden. That makes you special.’ But I saw what being ‘special’ looked like to this family.”
It looked like Ben wrecking a boat on Beaver Lake, slamming into some poor kid on a Jet Ski who never walked again. No matter that Ben was drunk, no matter that he should have been arrested. The kid lost his legs, but thanks to the McTavish fortune, he had a full bank account for life.
It looked like Howell’s wife, sunglasses hiding black eyes, but new diamonds always appearing in her ears, around her neck, before the bruises even faded. Howell was a mean drunk but a regular at Tiffany’s.
It looked like Nelle, placidly watching the police haul away one of the cleaning crew on robbery charges. Then, later that same evening, appearing at dinner wearing the very same bracelet she’d claimed had been stolen. “I found it in my jewelry box,” she’d said with an elegant shrug, and nothing more. There was no phone call down to the station, and certainly no guilt at having jumped to conclusions.
It looked like Libby sitting on the edge of my bed, expecting me to be enthralled, assuming I’d be seduced.
And yeah, you know what? It looked like Ruby, picking some poor kid out of the foster system and hanging a golden anchor around his neck just to piss off her family.
“She hated it,” I tell Jules, sinking down on the bench in front of Ruby’s dressing table. “The idea of me leaving. I think it was the only time she ever raised her voice to me.”
