It was now or never. I moved as quickly and quietly as I could toward the front door, hoping to get out of the house before Patrick realized I wasn’t in my room.
I had a hand on the front door handle when Patrick appeared at the top of the stairs.
“Danny,” he said. “There you are. Didn’t you hear me calling for you?”
I turned to face him and managed a little shrug. “No. Sorry. What’s up?”
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“Back to school. I forgot my homework.” It was a terrible, utterly transparent lie. I didn’t do homework. Even if I did, how was I going to get back to school? There was no one waiting in a car in the driveway to take me there. Patrick’s eyes landed on my backpack, the dirty and battered Jansport I’d carried with me from city to city for years as I ran my petty scams, not the new leather messenger bag I took to school as Danny.
“That’s strange, since I heard Morales brought you in earlier,” he said, and his voice was suddenly different. Harder. He wasn’t talking to his kid brother anymore; he was talking to me. “I have a friend in the field office who keeps me in the loop about these things. Where are you really going?”
“Where I’ve got to,” I said.
“The FBI?” he said. “You think you know something?”
“The FBI already knows everything I do,” I said. It was a better lie than my last one, and the flash of panic in his eyes proved it. “I’m just getting out of here. Let me go, Patrick.”
He shook his head and took another step toward me. I backed away until the knob of the front door was digging into my spine. “I can’t do that,” he said.
“You can’t stop me,” I said, my voice calmer than I felt. “The damage is done, so you might as well let me go. Don’t make it worse.”
“I don’t know what you think you know—”
“That you murdered your little brother?” I said. The words just burst out of me. I couldn’t stop thinking of the boy on the baseball card, of how Danny was only a little older than that boy. “Dumped his body in the desert somewhere?”
Patrick stepped back as though I’d shoved him. “I could never hurt Danny.”
A liar knows his own kind. I should have been able to see the falsehood, but Patrick looked sincere. I guess he was a better liar than I thought. Better than me.
“He was just a little boy, Patrick,” I said. “Maybe he wasn’t perfect, but he deserved a family who loved him. Not one that would kill him and cover it up.”
“I didn’t do that!” he said, and he lunged toward me, not like he wanted to hurt me but like he wanted to bring me close, to make me understand. “He was my brother, and I loved him. I would have never touched him.”
“But you’d make your mother think she killed him,” I said, wheeling away from Patrick’s grasp, “and you’d blackmail her into covering it up. Make her live with that guilt and watch it destroy her a little more every day. What about that? What about Mia and Nicholas, having to live with the hope that Danny’s alive and will come home some day, when you know he’s dead? When you know because you killed him?”
Suddenly, the front door opened and Lex, loaded with grocery bags, came in.
“Hey, what are you two doing—”
“Lex, get out of here,” Patrick snapped.
“Does she know?” I said. “She must. You made her lie for you and say she’d seen Danny the morning he went missing.”
Lex’s face went lifeless and white, and the bags dropped from her fingers.
“Lex,” Patrick said softly. “Please. Go.”
But I was on fire. With the unfairness of what happened to Danny, with the unfairness of what happened to the boy on the baseball card. With what Patrick had done to Nicholas and Mia and Lex. Of how he took this wonderful family and twisted it until it broke.
“What else did you make her do?” I said. “How did you tell her you’d killed him?”
Lex covered her mouth with her hands. “Oh God,” she said.
Patrick rushed to her, putting his arms around her. She was crying, and she mumbled something into his chest I couldn’t make out.
“Please,” he said to her. “Please leave.”
“He killed Danny, Lex!” I said. “How can you be okay with that? He’s a monster!”
“No!” Lex cried. She held harder on to Patrick. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Patrick shook her. “Don’t say another word.”
I stared at them. Lex was sobbing, and they weren’t tears of grief or anger. They came from somewhere deeper and darker than that. And the way she held on to Patrick, desperate for his comfort and his . . .
His forgiveness.
The realization came to me slowly and in waves. Each time I tried to push it back, it came in stronger, a high tide that couldn’t be held back.
I looked at Patrick, whose expression was stricken and pale. “You didn’t kill him,” I said. I turned to Lex. “You did.”
? ? ?
Patrick let go of Lex. My head was swimming. Of course it was Lex. While Jessica had avoided me, and Patrick had put in just as much time with me as he needed to maintain the illusion, Lex had always been around. Either to keep an eye on me, because she had the most to lose, or to, in some sick way, assuage her guilty conscience by caring for me the way she hadn’t cared for her real brother. Patrick had helped protect her, because that’s what Patrick did; he was devoted to her above all people. She was the only one he’d create such an elaborate fiction for. He helped her convince Jessica that she’d been the one to kill Danny to protect Lex, he’d probably buried the body himself to protect Lex, and he’d taken the heat from the FBI to protect Lex.
“Why did you do it?” I whispered.
“It was an accident,” Patrick said.
“Bullshit.” I backed away from them. “You wouldn’t have gone to so much trouble to cover up an accident. Why are you protecting her?”
Patrick jumped at me, but Lex stopped him by grabbing him around the arm. “Stop it!” she said. “Stop!”
Then she put her hand on his cheek and turned his face to hers.
It was a simple movement, but there was something about it. The way her fingers lingered on his skin. The way the touch stopped him in his tracks and the way he leaned into it. It was . . . intimate.
It was not the way a sister touched a brother, and with a shiver, I heard Kai’s voice in my ears.
That’s some seriously ironic shit.
They were close. Like, really close.
Patrick beat up any guy who came near Lex until none did. He was in Lex’s bedroom in the early hours the night I’d discovered they knew I wasn’t Danny. His safe combination was her birthday, and he had a picture of her on his bedside table. One where she was lying on her side with her cheek in the grass, and if he was lying down in bed looking at it, it would be almost like . . .