I Swear (22 page)

I heard Kellan’s voice shatter the blaze in my brain. “Mr. Walker. Have you ever seen this email before?”

“No!”
I roared back at him.

“Miss Walker, did you send this email from Jacob’s account?”

Jillian stared at the table and shook her head.

“You gave her my computer, didn’t you?” I knew the answer even before Jillian looked at me and said, “Yes.”

She may have said more. She certainly did, but I didn’t hear it. I had reached the door to the conference room and was sprinting down the hall, past Katherine’s father, past a secretary walking across the hallway toward her desk, her white earbuds draped around her neck.

I burst through the doors of the building like I was coming up for air. There was a grassy area next to the fountains that lined the walkway out front. I raced toward the patch of lawn as I felt myself fall, and when my knees hit the soft, moist green, I wished that it would open up and swallow me whole.

29. JILLIAN

When Jake tore out of the room, Patrick strode toward the door like he was going to chase him down, then stopped, reached one hand out, and leaned against the glass wall of the conference room. His head dropped. He stared at his shoes for a moment, then he slowly walked back over to his chair and collapsed into it.

“Sit,” he said to me, and with one hand he reached out and grabbed my chair, rolling it back toward the table. I sat.

Kellan took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. When he replaced them, he glanced at Lauren Wolinsky, who was staring at me without a smile.

“Just one question,” Kellan said. “Miss Walker, did you send this email from Jacob’s account to Leslie Gatlin?”

“No,” I said.

In the silence that followed, Lauren Wolinsky shifted forward in her chair across the table from me. She slowly leaned across the table, folded her hands, and stared directly into my eyes.

“Then who did?” she asked. Her gaze cut right through me. “And remember, Miss Walker, you are under oath.”

•  •  •

I’ll never forget how we sat there in silence for what seemed like an eternity as we listened to the front door slam, then the car door, then heard Jake squeal away from the curb. And in the span of time between his tires peeling out and Krista’s next giggle, I sat in the silence and understood two things:

I didn’t know exactly how we’d gotten here.

But I knew exactly where Jake was going: He was headed to Leslie’s.

“Jesus,” said Krista, picking up the lamp and placing it back on the dresser. “Jake is such a spaz.”

“He just needs the right girl to channel all that pent-up energy toward,” said Macie with an arched eyebrow. “God, Jills. You’d think after all this time you could help me wear him down a little.”

“Macie. You know Jake,” I said. “He’s never done anything he doesn’t want to.”

“Or anyone.” Krista snickered.

Katherine rolled her eyes as she blew her nails dry.

“What?” Krista asked.

“That boy just needs to get out more,” Katherine said. “He
needs to see that there is more than just this one cloudy corner of the world.”

“So true, VP,” said Macie. “So very, very true. Maybe I’ll just kidnap that boy and take him to Paris next summer.” When she said it, she was looking at me, and in short order, everyone was looking at her.

“Paris?” asked Beth. “You’re going to Paris?”

Macie smirked. “It’s true. The senator promised me a trip for graduation, and even better than that . . .” She paused for effect. “I get a plus one.”

“Oh. Em. Geeeeee,” squealed Krista. “Take me, take me, take me!”

My stomach started to drop. Macie had called me about this trip the minute she’d found out at Christmastime. “Pack your bags,
mon chéri
,” she’d purred into the phone. “We’re heading to the continent.” She’d sworn me to secrecy about it so that no one else would get jealous. We’d been planning for months.

“Who are you taking? Who are you taking?” Krista was on her knees, bouncing up and down on my bed, about to have a cardiac arrest.

“Well . . . ,” Macie said, looking directly at me. “I haven’t decided yet.”

“What?” I said, and before I realized the word had fallen out of my mouth, Macie smirked and turned to the rest of the room.

“Keep your schedules open, ladies. I’ll need a friend in Paris. I’ll decide by graduation.”

I actually felt dizzy. I had already been shopping for the trip. I felt my heart race. I could hear the pounding in my ears.

Beth was back at the computer on my desk, already looking at the hotel Macie was telling them her dad had booked. Krista was squawking and pointing and shrieking; Beth was wide-eyed and smiling; even Katherine was drinking in the pictures over Beth’s shoulder.

Macie turned to me with an innocent smile. “Jillian, go grab the laptop and pull up that email I sent you with the exact dates.”

“I don’t know where it is,” I said.

“Oh, please.” She rolled her eyes. “It’s in Jake’s room. I saw it in there when I left him the necklace.”

I stared at her hard. Hadn’t I learned that she was like this when I came back from vacation two years ago and she introduced me to Katherine as her new VP candidate? I walked out of my bedroom and into Jake’s. I saw the laptop sitting on his bed. I clicked the enter key, and the screen jumped to life.

Numbly, I clicked open a new tab on the browser and typed in “gmail.com,” but instead of a log-in page, I saw an in-box load. I blinked. It was Jake’s in-box.

Jake and I had shared this MacBook for the past year. I inherited Dad’s old PC desktop when school started, and Jake had convinced Mom and Dad to get us the laptop so that he
didn’t have to sit in my room to do homework. We both had a user account set up on the laptop, and in all the months we’d passed it back and forth, I had never once powered it on to find that Jake was still signed in. He always signed out when he was done. Always.

As I was staring at his Gmail in-box, I heard a voice behind me.

“Find it?” Macie asked. I whipped my head around and saw her standing in the doorway of Jake’s room with her arms crossed.

I looked back at the screen, and my heart started pounding. I looked back at her.

“No. I found something else,” I said flatly.

“Oh, really?” she asked. “Did Jake leave an XTube video open?” She giggled.

“You know, you can be a real bitch,” I shot at her.

Both of her eyebrows shot up as she surveyed my face. Then she threw her head back and laughed. “Oh, please, Jills. You’re not really upset about this Paris thing, are you?”

“You said we were going together—just us,” I said.

“Well, that’s hardly fair to anyone else, is it?” she said with a glare.

“When have you ever been worried about what’s fair?” I asked.

“Nothing wrong with a little friendly competition, is there?” She was so pleased with herself. That smug, self-satisfied smile
on her face made me so furious, the top of my head felt hot under my hair.

“Oh, so now I have to
compete
to be a better friend to you?” I was almost shouting.

“Why not?” asked Macie with her imperial ice-queen voice. “What do you have to offer me, Jillian? Why should I take you with me?”

Her voice stopped me cold. It was like the cold slap of the ocean water against my face that summer in Cape Cod. Macie Merrick was looking at me and all she could see was the person I saw when I looked in the mirror. The answer to her question rang in my ears:
Nothing. I have nothing to offer you.

I couldn’t look at her anymore. My gaze fell back down to the screen, and when it did, I realized I was wrong.

My fingers were shaking as I moved the cursor across the in-box. I could hear something inside me—the voice of an old friend from far away:
Don’t do this
, it said.
This is not who you are.
I paused with my finger on the trackpad—the cursor hovered just over the “log out” link in the upper-right corner. One click, and the moment would be over—the possibility would pass. And so would my trip to Europe. The voice in my head seemed to grow more and more faint. I turned to look at Macie again, and something about her gaze made the voice fade away completely.

“What would you say if I offered you complete access to Jake’s email account?” I asked. I spun the laptop around on my
lap so that she could see the screen. She glanced from me to the screen and then back to me again.

“You’re shitting me,” she whispered.

I arched an eyebrow and shook my head. “What’s that worth to you?” I asked.

Slowly, Macie Merrick crossed the room staring at the screen on my lap and slumped onto the bed to see for herself.

“That,” she whispered, “is worth a first-class ticket to Charles de Gaulle.”

Then she moved the cursor slowly across the screen, away from “log out,” and clicked Compose.

I slid off the bed and headed to the door of Jake’s room.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“Paris,” I said.

Then I walked back to my room as I heard Macie start to type.

•  •  •

After what seemed like hours, Kellan Dirkson finally said, “No further questions,” and Patrick said something I don’t remember, and then I was walking down the long hallway and out of the building.

When I got to Jake’s car, he was already there, buckled in. He stared straight ahead when I slid into the passenger seat. His eyes were swollen from crying, and his face was red and blotchy.

“Don’t talk to me.”

“Jake, it’s not what you think—”

“It is, Jillian. It is what I think,” he said quietly.

“I didn’t know what she was going to write,” I said.

He turned and looked at me and smiled bitterly. “Sure you did, Jillian.”

“I didn’t know that—”

“Stop. Talking. Now.”

Jake’s voice was so quiet and so ferocious that I was scared. His knuckles were white on the steering wheel as he drove us home in complete silence. When we pulled up in front of the house, I saw Mom and Dad were both already home. Mom had promised us steaks on the grill tonight. She and Dad would want to know all about the deposition. We’d have to relive this one more time. Jake was staring at their cars too when I glanced at him. I knew he was thinking the same thing.

Suddenly I was crying. I was so exhausted. I didn’t want to talk about Macie or Leslie or anything anymore. I just wanted us to go inside and sit down with Mom and Dad and laugh and smile and know that everything was going to be okay.

“I’m so sorry, Jake,” I whispered.

He stared out the window at our house and the cars in the driveway. The sun had dropped below the clouds and was shooting flames off the snow on Mount Hood; dark-magenta rays spread across the sky. Any other night it would have been beautiful.

“Let me spell this out for you,” he said without looking at
me. “We will live here together until the end of the summer. We will go to college, and we may even see each other over breaks and at Christmas, but you are not my sister anymore.”

“Jake, please—”

He held up his hand. “You are actually worse than Macie Merrick, Jillian.” He tried to go on, but his voice cracked, and he had to stop and swallow. “Macie hated Leslie from day one. But not you—you were actually her friend once. You’re worse because you turned your back on Leslie. You knew that this was wrong, and you went along with it anyway. Every step.”

“Jake, I just want to explain it to you.” The tears were hot on my cheeks, and my chest shook. I could barely form the words.

Jake took off his seat belt and shook his head.

“You could talk from now until the end of time, Jillian, and there’d still be no explanation for this,” he said. “I’m done talking to you, and I’m done listening to you. I never want to hear you say another word.”

30. KATHERINE

“Daysun—this is hopeless. I want to prosecute these girls myself.”

Patrick’s voice was strained and angry. I couldn’t blame him. His week had been ten kinds of torment. After my deposition on Monday, Macie’s had followed on Tuesday before Jillian and Jake’s crash-and-burn disaster Friday.

I slipped off the couch in Daddy’s reception area and listened. The door of his office was partly open. It was Saturday afternoon. Daddy had played tennis with his doubles partner early this morning, and then come into the office to tie up some loose ends on the permitting case. I’d come with him to study for my chemistry exam on Monday in the peace and quiet of the empty firm, but when we walked in Patrick was pacing the hall outside Daddy’s office.

“I’m serious, Daysun. I’m ready to switch sides in this case.”

“Patrick, please.” Daddy’s voice was slow and low. “I know this has been hard, but we don’t have to prove anything here. Burden of proof is on the prosecution. They’ve got to show that there was some sort of responsibility here. And no one has ever been proven guilty of causing someone else’s suicide.”

Through the space between the door and its frame I saw Patrick place his hands wide on Daddy’s desk and lean across the dark mahogany. “Daysun, they are responsible for this suicide. Every one of them.”

When I heard Patrick say this, I remembered walking down the hallway with Daddy on Tuesday afternoon. Mike Merrick had rounded the corner, with Macie, clicking along behind him.

When her dad stopped to shake hands with mine, Macie leveled her eyes at me but didn’t speak.

“How’d it go in there, Senator?” Daddy boomed, pumping his hand.

“Just fine, Daysun. Just fine.” Mike Merrick was smiling like a possum eating briars. Or at least that’s what Aunt Liza would say. “Just can’t thank you and Patrick enough for prepping the kids so well on this.”

“Happy to help.” Daddy smiled. “Just got back from some tennis at the Bellevue Club. Let’s schedule a match when this is all over.”

“You’ve got yourself a deal,” he said and smiled, all charm and teeth and tan.

Macie raised her eyebrows at me and let out a long sigh as if to say she were bored. As her dad held the front door open for her, she turned back to look at me and narrowed her eyes. Then she stepped out the door and slipped her sunglasses onto her face like she was avoiding a group of paparazzi, and walked with her father toward the parking deck.