by T. L. Haddix
Sophie didn’t know how to respond. He was right. She was just trying to get by. But more upsetting was the question and the concern behind it. It reminded her so much of her Noah that it hurt to see.
“Why are you asking?” she whispered. “Why do you care?”
He stared at her, a slight frown between his eyebrows, and didn’t answer right away. When he did, she was almost sorry she’d asked.
“Because I’m starting to question everything I thought I knew about you.”
This time when she stood, he let her.
“Don’t. Don’t even open that Pandora’s box,” she warned, smoothing her hands down her sides. “It’ll rip you apart and me with you, and I’m not strong enough to go back into that hellhole. Not anymore. It won’t accomplish a damned thing except to hurt… everyone. It’ll hurt everyone.”
“Why?” he asked as he stood, then he stepped closer to her, lowering his voice to a whisper. “Why would it hurt? If the truth is what I’ve thought it is, you were only playing with me all those years ago. You were playing a game with Erica. Not the nicest thing in the world to do to a dumb guy but far from the worst thing you could do. So why would it hurt unless there’s more to the story?”
She was almost frantic to escape the clearing, the questioning. But she knew she couldn’t get far enough fast enough. He’d follow her.
“None of what happened between us was a game,” she managed to say through the constriction in her throat. “Not any of it, not from my perspective. But then again, I’m not the one who was playing games, getting revenge on the girl who chose his brother over him. What were you going to do? Sleep with me after the prom? Get me pregnant? Walk away? Rub it in her face? The trip to Italy was planned all along, wasn’t it? You were going to walk away all along. But the truth came out and everything backfired on you and all your plans for vengeance went straight down the drain, so you got mad. Don’t you dare try to tell me otherwise.”
He’d gotten a fake ID, she knew, one that said he was eighteen, and had reserved a hotel room for them for prom night. He’d pretended to be nervous about that, while Sophie’s nerves had been very real.
In all the time she’d lived with Harold and Renny, she’d never told more than a little white lie very occasionally, both because she couldn’t stomach dishonesty and because she didn’t want to give them any reason to get rid of her. But she’d been willing to tell a whopper of a lie on prom night because it meant she’d be with Noah. She’d have done anything he’d asked her to do short of hurting someone.
All the color faded from Noah’s face. He shook his head. “Sophie, no, that’s not how it was. That’s never how it was. You know that. You have to know that.”
“I don’t ‘have to know’ anything,” she spat. “I lived through the aftermath. You left. You got the hell out of here. I’m the one who had to stick around and listen to all the gossip, to get the—the stupid fake sympathy from people who didn’t give a righteous fuck about me or my feelings!” Her voice had risen to a shout, but she didn’t care.
“You ran away and had a life, and I had to stay here for two years and listen to her talk about how much she loved you every goddamned day. About how she’d tried to warn me that you were only interested in me to get back at her, but I wouldn’t believe her, and so my heartache was my own stupid fault. She rubbed it in my face until the hour she died, goddamn her. If it hadn’t been for her, you wouldn’t have given me a second glance! I wish to God you hadn’t.”
Desperate, she looked around the clearing, trying to figure out where the hell to go to get away from the pain. But it would follow her. It always did.
“I can’t do this,” she told him, anguished. “I told you that. I can’t do this anymore. I’ve hurt too much, and the only way to get it to stop was to lock it away. I won’t let you open that box again. I won’t. You can go to hell, Noah Campbell. Go back to Italy, go home, go fly a fucking kite. Just leave me alone.”
Without a backward glance, she ran. She ran from the clearing, ran to the edge of the woods, ran to the barn. She stopped for a minute to catch her breath, which was perilously close to a sob, and when she realized the barn was empty, she ran inside.
There was a hay loft, she remembered, and that would be the perfect place to hide. To hide and get control of her emotions and lock that damned box. That was the only way she would be able to hold herself together, by locking that infernal, damned box.
And if for some reason she couldn’t get the lid back on? There wouldn’t be anything left of her by the end of the day.
Chapter Seven
Noah was absolutely beside himself as he stood in the middle of the path and stared after Sophie. His heart was racing, and the pulse in his temples beat harshly with it. He thought about running after her, but he didn’t know what the hell he’d say or do when he caught her, so he let her go.
Her words and the pain behind them had staggered him like a punch to the head. Her raw emotion, as much as he wanted to deny what she’d said, told him more than anything that she was telling the truth. And God in heaven, he didn’t know how he was going to survive hearing it.
He was pacing in front of the bench a few minutes later when Eli found him.
As soon as he saw Noah’s face, Eli’s easy countenance faded. “What happened?”
“She lied,” Noah rasped. He ran his hands into his hair, grabbing hold and tugging hard. “Erica lied about everything, didn’t she? Sophie never did a single thing Erica said. She never betrayed me.”
The regret that crossed his brother’s face was another punch of sorts. “No, she didn’t.”
Noah’s nostrils flared as he stared at Eli. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me?” He strode over and curled his hands into Eli’s shirt, lifting him onto his tiptoes. “Why did you let me think she’d done that?” His eyes stung, and his voice was a raspy whisper, but he didn’t take his eyes from his brother’s. He needed to see the truth too badly.
Eli’s hands came up curl around Noah’s wrists, but he didn’t try to undo Noah’s grip. “Because you weren’t ready before. And because I didn’t know for a long time after she died how deeply she’d lied to Sophie. I’m sorry, Noah.”
“You still should have told me.” Noah let go of him and gave him a little shove, almost hoping Eli’d strike back.
His eyes flashed with anger, but he kept his emotions in check. “Would you have believed me? Or would you have accused me of covering up for Sophie? Would you have used that to hit at her, to hurt her more?”
As much as he wanted to deny that he’d have done such, Noah couldn’t. He swallowed. “She’s thought for thirteen years that I used her. All this pain, this hurt, this rage,” he growled as he thumped his chest, “that I’ve carried? She’s carried it too. And Eli, Sophie’s not like me. She’s soft. Deep inside, she’s so much softer than I ever was. Do you know what that kind of hurt does to someone like her? It’s changed her.”
Eli nodded. “I know.”
Noah stared at him for a moment then walked away, struggling as he’d not done in months—not since he’d had the vision of Eli injured and possibly dead—to regain control of himself. “I have to get her to listen to me, to know the truth. I have to fix this.”
“You can’t.”
Rubbing his mouth, Noah glared at Eli. “What do you mean I can’t? I have to.”
With a grunt, Eli sat on the bench. He patted the space beside him. “Because you’re not the only person who’s hurt her, and she’s developed a wall that she doesn’t let anyone behind. Not even me so much, not anymore.”
“Bullshit. You’re incredibly close. I’ve seen it.” Despite the contentious words, Noah sat.
“We are close. We’ve gotten each other through some pretty rough times. But she’s pulled away from me in the last couple of years. It isn’t a whole lo
t, but the difference is there.” He stretched out his legs, adjusting the prosthesis that had taken the place of his left foot. “It’s what she had to do to protect herself.”
“From what?” Noah ground out. “What happened that’s so bad she had to lock herself up in a Pandora’s box, as she put it?”
Eli rubbed his face and sighed. “After graduation, she went out to Seattle and found her dad. The asshole’s living his life, very happily too. He’s remarried, has two kids. One’s a little girl about seven years old at the time Sophie was out there, and from the way Sophie described her, it was like peering into a mirror and seeing herself in the past.”
“I thought he was overseas and that was why he never came back for her,” Noah said quietly. “It wasn’t safe for her to be with him.”
“That was true at first, but about four years after he left her with Harold and Renny, he came back stateside. He settled down out in the Pacific Northwest and forgot Sophie existed except to send checks until she was eighteen.”
Noah was afraid to ask, but he had to know. “What happened when she went to him?”
Eli’s jaw tightened, and his hand curled into a fist, which he thumped on his leg. “He wasn’t happy to see her. She didn’t want anything from him other than an explanation, though I think she probably hoped he’d have a change of heart. Instead, he blew her out of the water. Told her that he’d never wanted her, probably would still be married to Marcy if it hadn’t been for Sophie, and that he’d never really thought Sophie was his until he had his other daughter and saw how much they looked alike. He told her that he was finished with any obligation he’d ever had toward her since she was eighteen. That she was less than nothing to him. It devastated her.”
Noah closed his eyes, leaning forward to rest his forehead on his hands. “God Almighty.” He could only imagine what that would have done to the girl he’d known. The real Sophie, the one who’d existed all along. The one he’d turned his back on. “What’d she do?”
“She thanked him for his honesty, and she hit the road. Tooled around Southern California until she started school. Got a job as a waitress, exhausted herself between that and school to deal with the pain. Started locking herself away.”
“Why didn’t she come home?” Noah shook his head. “I’ll never understand how a man could say that to his child. Fucking bastard.”
It reminded him so much of what his mother had gone through with his grandfather it stung him on multiple levels. Being raised by an honorable man like John Campbell and influenced heavily by another good man—Owen—he found the notion of a parent being so cruel to someone they’d helped create unfathomable.
“She didn’t feel like she had a home to come back to. Plus, you were here, and she was still stinging from that, thanks to Erica. Erica brought up your intimacy with her on pretty frequent occasions. I think she did it just to keep us guessing, to keep the anger burning.”
Eli had confessed to him sometime back that Erica had used the lies about her intimacy with Noah as a weapon throughout the years of their marriage, and Eli hadn’t known the truth until after she died.
Noah knew the weight of the role Eli had played in the whole debacle that had been Noah and Sophie’s relationship back then still sat heavily on his brother’s shoulders. He couldn’t absolve Eli of that guilt any more than he’d already done, so he just laid a hand on Eli’s arm. When Eli clamped his hand over Noah’s, holding on tight, Noah had to swallow again and look away.
“It gets worse,” Eli said.
“I don’t know if I can handle worse,” Noah told him.
“Well, suck it up. If you want to know the truth, you’re going to have to hear some ugly parts.”
“Then spit it out. Please.”
“Okay. You know Sophie got engaged to a decent-enough guy, Eddie. They were a couple or three months out from the wedding when the wreck happened. Sophie’d been out of town for business—she was at some kind of conference—and she’d not been back very long. A few days at most. Erica got drunk, got into some trouble at a bar, and she called Sophie to come get her.”
Noah knew all that. “And?”
“And on the way back to our apartment, Erica told her that she’d slept with Eddie. She’d found out Sophie was the one who’d told me about Erica’s affair with the lieutenant, and Erica wanted to pay her back for that. She went over to the apartment while Sophie was out of town and seduced him. Didn’t take much effort apparently.
“In any event, Sophie didn’t want to believe her. But Erica told her some private things about Eddie that made her realize Erica was telling the truth. She was furious. She was going to pull over as soon as she got through that intersection, and she was going to make Erica get out and walk home. Walk wherever. She told me she didn’t care where Erica went. But the guy ran the red light and hit them, and the rest is history.”
“Did Sophie confront Eddie?” Noah asked quietly, shoving aside his desire to hunt the man down and rip him apart.
Eli nodded. “As soon as she woke up. Asked him flat out. When he confessed that it was true, that was it. She was done.” He sighed. “Marcy heard about the wreck through Harold, and she and her second husband came up from Florida. I don’t know why—guilt, maybe. Regardless, she stepped up and was there for Sophie. They took her back home with them.”
“I remember that,” Noah said. He and Eli had started talking after Erica’s funeral, clearing the air at least so far as to establish that Noah hadn’t slept with her. “But she doesn’t seem to have anything to do with Marcy now.”
“No, she doesn’t. See, after she healed, she worked for Marcy. She needed an assistant, and Sophie needed a job. It seemed like a perfect solution. Sophie lived in a little guest house on their property—Marcy’s husband is as rich as they come—and she thought everything was fine. She has two little sisters through Marcy, and they were all one big happy family. At least until she got a job offer eighteen months in, decided to take it, and promptly found herself thrown out of the house.”
Noah slowly shook his head, staring at his brother. “I don’t understand.”
“Sophie didn’t either. Not for a while. From what she could piece together, Marcy felt guilty when she had the wreck. But after that, she looked at Sophie more as an employee than anything. She wouldn’t even let Sophie call her Mom or anything, and Sophie chalked it up to her feeling the pressure to stay young. The circles they ran in, that was common.”
“And it wasn’t that at all. No wonder she shut down.” Noah felt empty just hearing what all she’d been through. He couldn’t imagine how hard it had been to experience.
“After her relationship with Marcy dissolved, I swear to you, I didn’t know if she’d pull through or not. I just happened to be in the States when it happened, and I was able to go to her. Took some leave, claimed it was a personal emergency, and got a few weeks with her. She came back to North Carolina with me for a while too. I really thought she’d slip away for good during the first couple of weeks.”
Noah studied him. “Mom and Dad visited you for a while a couple of years back.”
Eli nodded. “I called them. If Mom hadn’t been there, I don’t know what I would have done. What Sophie would have done. We got her through the worst of it, and when she came out on the other side, she was the person you see now. So what happened today?”
“I’m not sure. I asked her what had changed, and the past came up. We weren’t arguing or yelling at each other,” he said, glancing at Eli to make sure he understood. “Then it just blew up, and she was… gone. Given what you told me, I can see why.”
“What do you want to do?” Eli asked quietly.
Noah shook his head slowly, picking at a callus on his finger. “I don’t know. Honestly, I don’t know.”
He did—he wanted to go back in time and never leave her, to pro
tect her from all the hurt that was to come. He wanted to not have had his life ripped apart by a narcissistic sociopath. But as those weren’t options, he had to figure out how to go forward with what he’d learned.
Eli’s phone rang, interrupting them. He frowned when he looked at the screen. “Yeah?” he answered. The frown intensified. “No, he’s here with me. She didn’t come back to the house? Uh-huh. Okay. And her car’s still there?”
Noah knew he was talking about Sophie, and he straightened slowly, watching his brother.
“No, we’ll head back. I’m sure she’s fine, Molly. Okay, bye.” He put the phone back on his belt. “Do you know which way Sophie went?”
“Back toward the house. She’s not there? Did Molly call her cell phone?”
“No and yes, but Sophie doesn’t carry it for dinners, at least not usually. Just how upset was she?”
Noah stood, raking his hands through his hair. “Very. I should have gone after her, but I thought it would make things worse if I did.”
“It probably would have,” Eli told him. “Any idea where she’d go?”
For several seconds, Noah couldn’t think of anywhere. But then something clicked. “The barn. I’ll bet she’s in the barn.”
Eli’s left eyebrow shot up. “Grandpa’s barn?”
Noah started up the path to Owen and Sarah’s. “Yeah. We used to sit in the hayloft and… never mind.”
“You and Sophie used the barn for rendezvous?”
“Did you miss the ‘never mind’ part of that statement?” Noah’s face felt as if it were on fire. “Regardless of what we used the barn for, I’ll bet that’s where she is. It was a refuge of sorts for us after Sunday dinners.”