Shattered Dreams: A Midnight Dragonfly Novel (21 page)

The way her voice trailed off gave me the opening I’d been seeking. “The house?” I asked. “The one in the Garden District, where you grew up?”

She pulled back, her eyes meeting mine. “You know about that?”

I didn’t blink. “Chase showed me.”

Her sigh was barely audible. “You loved it there,” she whispered, and I could tell that she had, too. “There were so many places to hide … You’d come over and I’d laugh the whole time, because you were so cute the way you ran around from one secret hideaway to another …

“You always had a doctor kit with you,” she said with a laugh, and my heart squeezed. “No one escaped you, not even your cat. He’d lay there forever, just letting you jam that stethoscope all over his body.”

I swallowed. “I had a cat?”

“You loved him so,” she whispered. “After the fire—”

The words just stopped. Everything did.

“Fire?” Despite the chill, the word burned the back of my throat. “What fire?”

It was like a body blow. Never once had anyone mentioned a fire.

Aunt Sara didn’t move, gave no indication that she’d heard my question. But I knew that she had.

“Please.”
My stomach churned as I pulled back and looked up at her whitewashed face. “Don’t shut me out.”

Slowly she blinked, and I could see then, see the bottomless brown of her eyes, the dark twist of pain and love and regret. Of fear.

And before I even asked the question, I knew.

“My parents,” I whispered. “The accident.” The one everyone refused to speak about. All along, I’d assumed it was a car wreck. “It was a fire, wasn’t it?”

She closed her eyes, and I had my answer.

So much hit me at once, all the emotions I’d seen reflected in her eyes, but more. Worse. Because screaming in the middle of it all was the undeniable assault of betrayal. I’d been lied to. By everyone.

“No,”
I whispered, pulling back, stepping away. I wanted to turn and run to my room, slam the door behind me and hit the rewind button. The do-over. Wake up again and make different choices, ignore the dream, steer clear of the candlelight vigil—

But we didn’t get different choices. At least, like my grandmother said, not in the past. The only thing we could do over was the future.

“You lied,” I muttered, and Aunt Sara winced, the color flooding back to her face. “You lied about
everything
.”

She had the good grace—or flat-out intelligence—not to come after me. “Not everything.”

“You knew,” I pressed. “You
knew
I thought it was a car crash!”

“And how is this better?” she asked. “How is this better for you to have to imagine a fire destroying the house, what their last moments must have—”

She broke off with a quick hand to her mouth.

I stood there, trying to process, to understand.
To breathe.
But it all collapsed around me, the truth—the lie—that had been perpetrated on me for the past fourteen years.

My parents had been killed in a fire.

“Was I there?” The horrific band tightening around my chest told me that I was.

Finally, someone chose not to sugarcoat. “Yes.”

“Was it day or night?”

“Night.”

“Were we … sleeping?”

“Yes.”

Like a weary sprinter, I ran backward through my mind, tripping over all the inconsequential things like hikes through the mountains and trips to the store, blizzards and the summer I’d come down with chicken pox, looking for … anything. Any remnant of what Aunt Sara was saying—smoke, flames, heat.

Screams.

Terror.

If nothing else, the terror should still be there. The fire.

It should
be there
.

“But I saw their house,” I said, speaking with no real awareness of doing so. “Gran’s house. They’re still there.”

“They were staying down south, at a friend’s house.”

And I would have sworn I saw the embers of those long-forgotten flames still burning in her eyes. “Then … where was I? How did I get out and they—”

Died.

They died.

While I lived.

“A neighbor saw the flames, got you out. By the time he ran back…”

It was too late.

Numbly I lifted my hand to the amulet dangling around my neck, the one that had once belonged to my mother, and closed my fingers around the smooth, timeless edges of the brass dragonfly. Even when all else was cold, decimated, it warmed.

It lived.

“Trinity, I’m so sorry,” my aunt whispered, echoing my words of only a few minutes before, when I’d thought she was the one in need of comfort.
“I am so horribly sorry.”

*   *   *

The sun rose. The clouds burned off. The sky turned bright blue. Aunt Sara fixed coffee and set out some grapes. I took another shower, fiddled with my laptop.

Nothing seemed real.

The more I tried to understand, the less anything made sense.

Aunt Sara had a meeting. She tried to cancel, but I urged her to go, told her I needed to be alone. I think she felt guilty; either that, or she needed to get away as badly as I did.

I promised to stay put, keep the doors locked. Open for no one. And finally, shortly before eleven, she left.

Shortly after eleven, Victoria texted.

I am so sorry. Lucas is such an ass.

Sitting on the floor stretching, I welcomed the distraction and thumbed out a quick reply.

Don’t worry about it. r u ok?

Our messages flew back and forth.

I’m good. Great! R U OK?

I’m OK.

What about Chase? Did he call you?

No.

Oh.

I don’t want him 2.

Really?

Really.

Oh. Guess what? Zach called. He asked me out.

R U sure that’s a good idea?

Best. Idea. Ever.

What about Lucas?

History.

I wanted to believe her. I did. But I also knew better. Victoria and Lucas had one of
those
relationships. I started to warn her, but she texted again before I could. Absently, I clicked over.

The message was not from Victoria.

NINETEEN

Chase.

I stared at the bright pink of the silicone case against the white gauze circling my palm, the way the letters of his name glowed against the screen. My chest rose and fell. Part of me wanted to hurl the phone across the room, watch it smash against the window.

But the memory of how he’d looked at me in that one shattered moment when I’d told him to go but before he’d yet to move, of how badly I’d needed him just a short breath later, when I’d run through the garage and the detectives had mocked me, when my aunt had blown the lid off the lie of my life, made me want to pull up the message as fast as I could, drink it all in.

It’s no surprise which part won.

NEED 2 C U.

My eyes watered.

ITS IMPORTANT

My heart got into the game, slamming against my ribs. Breathing hurt. Wondering … remembering … wanting.

Those didn’t help.

EMMA WATSON LIED

The messages kept coming, one after the other. And with them came my own questions. WHAT DO YOU MEAN? LIES ABOUT WHAT? HOW DO YOU KNOW? WHERE ARE YOU?

WHY WON’T YOU LEAVE ME ALONE?

But as fast as my thumbs formed the questions, I deleted them.

I JUST LEFT HER HOUSE.

Shock brought a dull blade of unease. I’d been working so hard to manage everything, keep certain truths from getting out. It had never occurred to me Chase would go back,
without me.

What in God’s name had that woman told him?

I NO Y SHE HATES UR MOTHER.

I froze.

NOT BECUZ OF HER DAUGHTER, BUT HER SON IN LAW.

I tried to swallow, but my throat wouldn’t work.

A COP

Then:

AM GOIN 2 C HIM NOW.

And finally my fingers started to move.
Fly.

This time I had no choice but to hit send.

The second I read his reply, I realized I had no choice but to break a promise, either.

LOOK OUT YOUR WINDOW. I’M ALREADY HERE.

*   *   *

Aunt Sara wasn’t happy. Via a rapid exchange of texts she reminded me of all the reasons I wasn’t supposed to go anywhere. But I, in turn, pointed out that LaSalle had said
alone
. And while Detective I-Can’t-Trust-Anyone didn’t trust Chase, I did.

Even if he had backed me into a corner.

“He grew up in the Garden District. She lives on the outskirts of the Quarter. Those aren’t parallel circles.”

In the passenger seat of the restored Camaro, I stared straight ahead. I’d asked him to leave me alone. I’d
begged
him to. But he’d turned around and played the one card he knew there’d be no way I could resist. I wanted to be angry about that. Really, really angry.

But even more, I wanted to reach out and put my hand to his arm, look into his eyes and ask him to hold me the way he had when he’d found me running from the French Quarter courtyard. I’d felt safe then. For that one, fragile, fleeting moment,
I’d felt safe
.

I wanted to feel safe again.

But Chase didn’t know. He didn’t know about the man in the parking garage—or the fire.

I wasn’t ready to talk about either.

“According to the deed, your dad was twenty-one when he purchased it. Five years later he married your mother.”

Woodenly, I kept my eyes on the window, where the remains of the Ninth Ward zipped by. It was hard to imagine this barren stretch of weeds and garbage had once been a thriving community. Only a few houses had sprung back up, the Brad Pitt houses as they were called, a handful of brightly colored structures that looked more like modern art than homes.

I counted three separate tour buses in the area.

“I didn’t see how Emma Watson could possibly have known him his whole life.”

I’d been so focused on keeping her from talking about my mother, I’d never made that connection.

“But she was telling the truth,” Chase said, and I twisted toward him so fast, my hair slapped my face.

I hated being played.
“You said she lied.”

Slowing for a red light, he shot me a quick glance. “She did.”

I felt my eyes narrow, telling him without words he’d better keep talking.

Instead he stopped the car and reached over, took my hand in his.

I winced.

He frowned. “I’m on your side, T. Why is that so hard for you to believe?”

Looking at him hurt, because looking at him made me want. Made me long. “I just want everyone to stop.”

“Stop what?”

Deciding what I did and did not need to know. Where I could and could not live. What I should and should not do.

“Playing God,”
I whispered. I just wanted to wake up in the morning like everyone else, walk through the day without worrying about what I was going to see—or imagine.

“It’s
my
life,” I said, wrenching away and looking back to the street. “The light’s green.”

He laughed. It was so not what I’d expected.

Not looking like he gave a damn whether the light was red, green, or purple, he took his time returning his attention to the road.

“Welcome to mine,” he muttered. But it was five minutes until I understood what he meant.

We zoomed along Judge Perez Drive, the main drag cutting through St. Bernard Parish, where a succession of abandoned strip malls and gas stations lined the road. The parish had been hit hard by Katrina. Virtually every building had been completely under water. Less than half the population had returned. Like a scene from some bad sci-fi, entire neighborhoods, once crowded and middle class, sat empty and rotting.

After a few miles Chase turned onto what looked like a boulevard—but other than a few dead trees, there was nothing on either side. I frowned, oddly uneasy. Then he turned again, onto a street with a sidewalk but no houses, and stopped.

“I thought we were going to see my mom’s friend—”

He pushed open the door and stepped into the late-morning sunshine, staring at a long strip of badly cracked concrete leading away from the road. It almost looked like … a driveway.

But it led nowhere.

“Chase?” I asked, following him from the car. “Where are we?”

“My life,”
he murmured. And then he walked away.

I stood there on the remains of what had once been a sidewalk, watching him walk toward a tangle of weeds and bushes in the outline of a house. And from one breath to the next I knew where we were.

I watched him approach what must have been a carport, moving through a back door that no longer stood. He would be in the kitchen, I imagined as he took a few steps and lifted his hand to a refrigerator that was no longer there.

Orange juice or milk, I thought inanely, and then I didn’t think at all, I just crossed through the knee-high weeds and went to him, lifted a hand without thinking, and laid it against his back. I felt him stiffen, felt the lingering ache of loss clear down to my soul.

It was so easy to get lost in your own life and your own grief, your own … drama. It was so easy to see only your own darkness.

But standing there in the glare of a sun not shielded by even the thinnest of clouds, I realized I had no exclusive rights to heartache.

“I’m sorry.”

They should have been my words. I was the one fumbling for the right thing to say.

But it was Chase who spoke first.

“You have nothing to be sorry for,” I whispered.

He didn’t look at me, barely even moved. Were it not for the rise and fall of his shoulders, I would not have even known that he breathed. “I heard what Amber said to you,” he said. “About me and Jessie.”

I stiffened, did not want the memory. “She can’t hurt me.”

He moved without warning, twisting toward me so fast I had no time to step back. And then when his eyes found mine, I didn’t want to.

“But you’re afraid I will,” he murmured. “That’s why you told me to leave you alone.”

Around us a warm breeze swirled through walls that no longer stood, but that I, somehow, felt.

“I’m sorry,” he said again. “Sorry for dragging you into all this.”