“Oh yeah? For what?” I don’t have time for this. We don’t have time for this. I push away thoughts of what will happen to Hana even if I manage to escape. She’ll be here, in the house…
My stomach is clenching and unclenching. I’m worried the bread will come straight back up. I have to stay focused. What happens to Hana isn’t my concern, and it isn’t my fault, either.
“For telling the regulators about 37 Brooks,” she says. “For telling them about you and Alex.”
Just like that, my brain powers down. “What?”
“I told them.” She lets out a tiny exhalation, as though saying the words has given her relief. “I’m sorry. I was jealous.”
I can’t speak. I’m swimming through a fog. “Jealous?” I manage to spit out.
“I—I wanted what you had with Alex. I was confused. I didn’t understand what I was doing.” She shakes her head again.
I have a swinging, seasick feeling. It doesn’t make any sense. Hana—golden girl Hana, my best friend, fearless and reckless. I trusted her. I loved her. “You were my best friend.”
“I know.” Again she looks troubled, as though trying to recall the meaning of the words.
“You had everything.” I can’t stop my voice from rising. The anger is vibrating, ripping through me like a live current. “Perfect life. Perfect grades. Everything.” I gesture to the spotless kitchen, to the sunshine pouring over the marble counters like drizzled butter. “I had nothing. He was my one thing. My only—” The sickness surges up and I take a step forward, clenching my fists, blind with rage. “Why couldn’t you let me have it? Why did you have to take it? Why did you always take everything?”
“I told you I was sorry,” Hana says again mechanically. I could shriek with laughter. I could cry, or tear her eyes out.
Instead I reach out and slap her. The current flows down into my hand, into my arm, before I know what I am doing. The noise is unexpectedly loud, and for a moment I’m sure the guards will burst through the door. But no one comes.
Instantly, Hana’s face begins to redden. But she doesn’t cry out. She doesn’t make a sound.
In the silence, I can hear my own breathing—ragged and desperate. I feel tears pushing at the back of my eyes. I’m ashamed and angry and sick all at once.
Hana turns slowly back to face me. She almost looks sad. “I deserved that,” she says.
Suddenly I am overcome with exhaustion. I am tired of fighting, of hitting and being hit. This is the strange way of the world, that people who simply want to love are instead forced to become warriors. It’s the upside-down nature of life. It’s all I can do not to collapse into a chair again.
“I felt terrible afterward,” Hana says in a voice hardly above a whisper. “You should know that. That’s why I helped you escape. I felt”—Hana searches for the right word—“remorse.”
“What about now?” I ask her.
Hana lifts a shoulder. “Now I’m cured,” she says. “It’s different.”
“Different how?” For a split second, I wish—more than anything, more than breathing—that I had stayed here, with her, that I had let the knife fall.
“I feel freer,” she says. Whatever I was expecting her to say, it isn’t this. She must sense that I’m surprised, because she goes on. “Everything’s kind of…muffled. Like hearing sounds underwater. I don’t have to feel things for other people so much.” One side of her mouth quirks into a smile. “Maybe, like you said, I never did.”
My head has started to ache. Over. It’s all over. I just want to curl up in a ball and go to sleep. “I didn’t mean that. You did. Feel things, I mean, for other people. You used to.”
I’m not sure she hears me. She says, almost as an afterthought, “I don’t have to listen to anybody anymore.” Something in her tone is off—triumphant, almost. When I look at her, she smiles. I wonder whether she’s thinking of anyone in particular.
There is the sound of a door opening and closing and the bark of a man’s voice. Hana’s whole face changes. She gets serious again in an instant. “Fred,” she says. She crosses quickly to the swinging doors behind me and pokes her head into the hall tentatively. Then she whirls around to face me, suddenly breathless.
“Come on,” she says. “Quick, while he’s in the study.”
“Come on where?” I say.
Hana looks momentarily irritated. “The back door leads onto the porch. From there you can cut through the garden and onto Dennett. That will take you back to Brighton. Quickly,” she adds. “If he sees you, he’ll kill you.”
I’m so shocked that for a moment I just stand there, gaping at her. “Why?” I say. “Why are you helping me?”
Hana smiles again, but her eyes stay cloudy and unreadable. “You said it yourself. I was your best friend.”