I turned back to Heidi. It was hard to move my body. It felt too heavy and everything else seemed to be moving at warp speed while I was stuck in slow motion. “Don’t worry, Heidi. It’s just my cousin selling drugs.”
“What?” said the other guy. “What did she say?”
“Molly, Jesus,” said Zach. He turned to the other guy. “Hey, dude, be cool. It’s my cousin throwing a party. It’s not a big deal.”
The guy picked up the gun on my father’s desk. The antique one, the one I’d been playing with earlier. The one I wanted to use to take sexy pictures. He pointed it at us. “Either of you says a word—”
“It’s not loaded, idiot,” I said, giggling.
“It’s not?” The guy pulled the trigger.
The gun went off.
I ran over to him and wrested it out of his grasp. “What the hell?” I looked down at the gun in my hands.
And then I looked over at Heidi, who was lying in a pool of her own blood, her brains spattered against the wall of my father’s study.
I dropped the shirt like it had burned me. My mouth was dry. That wasn’t what happened. Was it?
I tore across the room to find my phone.
* * *
“It’s the middle of the night, Molly.” Zach’s voice was thick from sleep.
“I didn’t shoot her,” I said. “I didn’t shoot Heidi.”
“Aw, shit,” he muttered. “You remembered that, huh?” He sounded more awake now.
“What the fuck, Zach?”
“Look, Molls, it was easier that way. It was your father’s idea. He knew that if he tried to cover up a spat of violence that was connected to the business, it would go badly. But if it was you, with your lack of record, and your good grades, there’d be judges he could pay off, people who’d be unwilling to ruin a young girl’s life.”
“My father’s idea?”
“You didn’t remember what happened anyway,” he said. “You were black-out drunk. You passed out almost right afterward. You had the gun in your hand. It just made everything smoother, you know.”
“But… I didn’t shoot her.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“But I thought that I did. I’ve spent months of my life thinking that I had…”
“Hey, I’m sorry. But no matter how you look at it, it was an accident.”
“I felt responsible. I thought I killed my best friend.”
“Hey,” said Zach. “I know it’s been tough on you. I told your dad you could probably handle the truth, and that if we asked you to take the fall, you would. After all, we all know that being part of this family requires sacrifices. But he wouldn’t have it. He said he didn’t want you to know anything. He was trying to protect you.”
“Protect me? By making me think I shot Heidi?”
“His heart was in the right place.”
“No,” I said. “No, it wasn’t.”
“Look, I really am sorry. I wish it had gone down a different way.”
“I…” I was at a loss for words. I hung up the phone. I stared down at it, too horrified to cry. To scream. To rage.
I lay back on the couch and pulled the covers tight around me.
I gazed at the ceiling.
No.
No, it couldn’t be true.
I whispered that over and over, my lips barely moving.
And somewhere in the middle of my repeated litany, I fell asleep.
* * *
I woke up early, cold under my blankets. No one else was awake in Wyatt’s house. I tried to burrow, to curl up and get more heat, but it wasn’t working, so I just got up.
It was Saturday. I didn’t have any classes that day.
I paced in the living room, thinking about my father.
I felt betrayed.
And it ate into me like a cancer.
When I was a kid, before my father was arrested, I had no idea what he did for a living. It wasn’t something that I thought about much.
After the police came and took him away, I found out.
I knew that I loved my father, so it was pretty obvious to me as a kid that if the cops had taken him away from me, they were the enemy.
But now…
Things seemed muddled. Thinking that I had killed Heidi had practically destroyed me. I’d hardly been able to breathe, to exist. Everything had hurt so badly. It had cost me my relationship with Duncan. It had sent me off to this college. It had started the schism between me and my family.
Now that I knew that my father had concocted the story to protect his precious business, I was pretty sure that the schism was complete.
I hated him for what he’d put me through.
Everything was confusing now. All the things that I’d believed, all the things that I’d valued were called into question. I didn’t know how I was going to sort through it all.