“Before I lost it, I checked it. I checked it twice.” She waited a beat, then added, “Like Santa.” She grinned at him, and as she did, he saw that she had good news to deliver. He exhaled and smiled. “He’s not on there, Micah. He’s not on there anywhere.” Micah bridged the gap between them in two steps and swooped her up, hugging her so tight she could barely breathe. But she didn’t mind. She didn’t mind a bit.
“Thank you,” he said, and kissed her cheek. Shocked by the unexpected contact, she pulled back, a reflex she instantly regretted. Micah’s face became all circles: round dots of color on his cheeks, round eyes, round mouth. He set her down and took a step back.
“I’m sorry,” he said, holding his hands up. “I shouldn’t have done that. You’ve been so nice to me these past few weeks. You’re practically the only person who has been nice to me in this whole freaking town. I didn’t mean to overstep.” He lowered his head. “No one wants to be this close to a girlfriend killer.” He said it low, but she heard it.
The silence between them swelled until she finally spoke, her words quiet, but clear. “You didn’t kill your girlfriend,” she said.
He gave her a sad smile. “You’re sweet, Violet,” he said. “But I know what everyone thinks. Trust me, you don’t have to try to save me from that. You’ve done enough, just with what you’ve done.”
He took a step back, ready to move toward the door. She could just let him go, let him and everyone else keep thinking what they’d thought since that night last spring. Or she could finally tell her secret. There were only so many secrets Violet could carry. She’d picked up a new one tonight, so this was as good a time as any to lay the old one down.
“I saw you,” she said, and watched as his face changed from resigned to curious. “That night. Of your party. I was . . .” She searched for a less incriminating, less embarrassing way to say what she had to. “I was watching the party from my window.” She pointed in the direction of her house. “I had the window up, and I could hear everything.”
She waited for him to grasp what she was saying. He frowned at her, perplexed. “You heard? You heard what?”
“You broke up with her. And she was crying. She’d cheated on you, and you’d caught her.”
“That part everyone knows. Lizzie McCoy told everyone that she saw Olivia kissing that other dude.” He gave her a half smile, like she was cute trying to be in the know.
“But not everyone knows what I know,” she said. “It’s the part you didn’t tell anyone.” She waited for him to realize what she was referring to, watched as the flicker of knowledge crossed his face like a fluorescent light, coming on in phases. “I always wondered why you didn’t tell.”
He raised his eyebrows, still unwilling to admit anything. “Why I didn’t tell what?”
“She told you she was going to kill herself. She said she was going to drink enough to die. She said she was going to drink herself to death and make sure you got blamed for it. She said if you broke up with her she was going to ruin your life.”
Micah winced, though Violet knew it wasn’t because of what she said. It was because he was recalling it. “It worked,” he said. “She ruined it.” His shoulders slumped.
“But why didn’t you tell that part? That it wasn’t an accident? That she said she was going to do it? Why did you take the blame like you did?”
“Because I blamed myself. I was hard on her that night. Things hadn’t been good with us for a while. We were basically over, but we were kind of both hanging on. Hell, that’s why she hooked up with that guy. But she was scared for us to really be over. So she threatened me. And I thought that was all it was—just a threat. She was always being dramatic, saying shit like that. So I ignored her. And I went inside and got drunk myself, and I never even looked for her again.” He looked at Violet, and she saw tears pooling in his eyes.
“I just pushed it out of my mind and went and had fun. I didn’t see her again, so I thought she left. Come to find out, she did exactly what she said she was gonna do.” He shook his head. “It was her last words—those texts she sent—against mine. And I’m not one to speak ill of the dead. I figured, sure, people would think it was lousy, but I thought . . . I thought my friends would know me. They’d know I wasn’t the type of person who’d do something like that. I thought they’d ask me. They’d give me the chance to explain.”
“But no one did,” Violet said.
One tear escaped and trickled down his cheek. Another followed close behind. “No one. They all just condemned me, and it was like, once they did that, I didn’t want to try to explain. I just, like, went inside myself, so no one could get to me. I figured it was easier that way. I’d finish out my senior year and get the hell out of here.”
Violet nodded her understanding. Feelings like Micah’s made her into the girl at the window, watching the party but never daring to join it. She found it easier to keep her distance. There was less risk of getting hurt that way. She thought of her father—her own father—sending her away, her mother lying to her for years, her best friend pushing her away because Violet wasn’t cool enough. She understood being misunderstood, being rejected. She just never dreamed someone like Micah Berg might understand, too. She saw him smiling at her and gave him a quizzical smile back.
“What?” she asked. She couldn’t fathom what he’d find to smile about after a speech like that.
“And then one day,” he said, “I find the girl across the street hiding with Casey Strickland in my bushes. And everything changed.” He laughed.
“So you don’t hate me? For keeping quiet all this time, for not coming forward?”
He shook his head. “No.” He paused. “Actually, I—”
He stopped short, clapping his lips together like a drawbridge closing. She wanted to know what he was about to say so badly, but something inside her told her not to ask. All in due time; she felt the words more than heard them. And for a moment she wondered if this was what her grandmother had been talking about, about being a Beaucatcher. Maybe this sense of knowing had lived inside her all along—an instinct, something that would grow over time, its own kind of power, gaining strength.
There in that room with Micah Berg standing before her, working out what he would say next, she understood for the first time that she had more ahead, so much more. She felt herself straining toward this unknown future, not afraid anymore. The anticipation felt like she imagined riding in a convertible with the wind rushing through her hair would feel. She’d never done that before, but she had the sense that she would, someday. She would do it all.
Nico
October 22
Nico stood in front of the mirror and knotted his tie with the practiced efficiency of a man who’d done so every day for many years. But this time he did it in front of the mirror on his dresser, in his bedroom, in his house. He pulled the knot firmly and thought about friendly neighbor Mike and the casual conversation he’d had with him the day before. He’d pretended to need to borrow a posthole digger to fix that post. He’d used the opening to let Mike know he had moved back in the house, and to clue Mike in on what he knew had been going on. He made sure to point out that Mike’s wife was the only one of the four of them who was clueless. Nico had built his career on clues, he’d told Mike, then watched with satisfaction as the other man nodded his understanding, looking stricken.