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“How can you be sure?”
“Because I’ve known bad people. You’re not one of them.”
“Bad people like you?”
The silence hangs between us for a single, slender moment.
“I’m sorry,” she says quickly. “I didn’t mean that. You do bad things, maybe, but that doesn’t make you a bad person, I don’t think. I’m sorry. I’m rambling.”
“Yes. You are.”
“Why did you come with me? Why didn’t you protect him instead?”
“I owed you.” It’s a half-truth, but I can’t get the whole truth out. Not now.
“You owed me,” she repeats, as though the word tastes wrong on her tongue. “What a strange thing. Are we even now?”
“You tell me.”
“I didn’t know we were uneven to begin with.”
I go quiet at that.
Finley tells me a story in my silence. “When I was five, my father left for a week. He didn’t say where he was going. Or how long before he’d be back. He just left. I found out later that he’d run out the clock on one of his gambling debts and he’d been kidnapped by…whoever. I don’t know how they made him repay the debt. All I know was that I was five and I was alone.”
“What’d you do?”
“I waited for him. I ate everything in the cabinet. By the last two days, all we had left were saltine crackers.”
“I’m sorry.”
“The strange thing is, I’m not mad at him for it. I’m mad at myself.”
“You were five.”
“I could have left the house. Or knocked on a neighbor’s door. I knew the neighbors—the Steinways lived in the apartment downstairs. We had a phone. I could have called someone. Anyone.”
“You were five.”
“I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. Processing. I don’t want to feel helpless like that ever again. I think that’s what happened with Raphael. He made me feel helpless, and I snapped.”
“You’re stronger than you know.”
She’s quiet for a long moment. So long that I think she’s gone to sleep.
“Will you hold me?” she says suddenly. “Only if you want to. Not because you owe me.”
That I can do.
I rise and go to her bed. When I pull the covers back, however, she takes in a sip of breath, and her eyes go wide.
I freeze. I’ve done something wrong.
“Sorry,” she says, and her eyes flicker over me rabbit quick. “It’s just. Your clothes. They’re…dirty.”
Right. Her germaphobe thing.
I reach behind myself and tug my shirt over my head. “Roll over,” I tell her.
