The Safest Lies

by Megan Miranda

  Samuel listened to my mother, dropping his hand from my face. But he didn’t move. “Tell me, Kelsey. Do you know who I am?”

  “Yes,” I said, feeling the taste of acid rising in the back of my throat. The other half of me. “You’re the man who held my mother.”

  He looked over his shoulder. “Amanda, is that what you told her?”

  He turned back, his gaze lingering on my chin, my nose, my hair. He faced my mother again, gave her half a smile. “She looks more like me.”

  My mother frowned. Of course she knew that. She saw it in me always. What else did she see, that she felt the need to hide? Did I act more like him, talk more like him? Did she teach me to be more like her, because she saw what else I might become?

  My eyes burned. Everything burned. I wanted to step outside my skin, become anyone other than who I was.

  He took a step closer, the light behind him, as if he were the moon eclipsing the sun—and all that remained was darkness. “Your mother is a thief and a liar,” he said, his voice like music, though it dripped with acid. “Don’t listen to what the papers said. She came with us because she wanted to.”

  “Because I didn’t know!” she yelled from behind him. “I didn’t know who you really were!”

  He shook his head. “You knew exactly who I was,” he said. “We were together for months before I offered to bring you with us. Months. We are the same, you and I. I was the only one who understood you. I saved you from your life of misery. And this is how you repaid me? By leaving and taking our money? I loved you, Amanda. I really did.”

  “You did not. You did not. I was young and naïve and you preyed on me.” She pointed to Eli. “Same as you’re doing to him.” She shook her head, pleaded with Eli. “Don’t listen to him. Don’t. You can go back home. Your home is better than this, I promise. It’s not too late—”

  Eli jerked back. “You know nothing about me.”

  “I know everything about you. You’re a kid who was looking for a way out of a bad situation, and they took you in, am I right? And the way they live, the things they do, the things they ask you to do, they just seem like little things at first. Just watch the doors, I bet they told you. Just keep the car running. Let me tell you, kid. It’s going to change.”

  Eli shook his head, but he didn’t disagree.

  “It already has, right?” she asked.

  Eli slid his battered fist behind his back. Set his feet, and his jaw. “I know all about you, Amanda Silviano. You took their money, and Sam’s kid, and let the world think you were their victim.” His spine straightened, and his voice grew more assured now. “They took me in. I ran away and they took me in when nobody else would, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”

  Samuel smiled. “See? Eli is nothing like you. He is not so weak. He would not betray us.”

  “Want to know what they’ll do to you if you change your mind, kid? When you find out what they’re really doing, and want to leave?” She pulled her shirt over her shoulder, exposing her scars. Leaned toward Samuel, and yelled, “You burned my back when I tried to leave! Poured it on me one drop at a time! You kept me locked up in a basement after! For months. With nothing but the cold and the containers of cleaning fluid you stored in the corners. And the spiders. The goddamn spiders were everywhere.” Her face broke at the memory.

  “It was your own fault,” Samuel said, and he was losing his composure now, his features hardening, the lines around his eyes deepening. “You don’t get to change your mind whenever the hell you feel like it.”

  My mother was shaking her head. “We just needed a little money to get by, you said. Just one thing, to get us started. It was all a lie. You had no intention of stopping. I hadn’t realized you’d been hurting people. I didn’t know that I…” She raised her hand to her mouth, her eyes watering over, the words stuck inside.

  “That you were just as guilty?” He smiled. Crouched so he was at her level. “I don’t know what you think would’ve happened if you had left back then. What, would you have gone home, said you left on your own and had been involved in a little crime spree, no big deal? You would’ve given us up, because it was the only thing you could’ve done. I couldn’t do that to my own brother. You left me with no choice.”

  Martin jerked to attention.

  “You took something from us, Amanda,” Samuel said. “And you will give it back now.”

  “I didn’t know,” she said, shaking her head. “I didn’t mean to.”

  “And yet, here we are,” he said.

  He turned to me. “She took our car,” he said. “She took everything inside of it, all that money. And you know what she first said she did with the money? That she buried it. Can you believe that, Kelsey? She is such a talented liar, your mother. But then, you must know that already. Now, of course, she sings a different story.”

  His words, circling into my mind. They were weaving a spell, digging in and refusing to let go. “The police have it,” I whispered, and Martin let out a string of curses. I pointed to the safe room. “It was in there, and the police took it.”

  “How much?” Martin asked, his voice growing louder. “How much?”

  “Twenty thousand,” I said.

  “Where’s the rest, Amanda? What have you done?” Samuel asked.

  “I did bury it,” she said. She looked at me, lowered her voice, like it was just me and her and this was a bedtime story. “I escaped on a Friday—they came back drunk and celebrating, and didn’t check on me. Didn’t know I’d finally gotten free of the restraints, had used a mattress rail to pry the bolts from the door hinges. The key was on the kitchen table, and they were in the next room, and I took it.” Martin jerked her head back, his fist tightening in her hair, but her mouth stretched into a smile instead, at the memory. “I drove that car as far as I could, until I’d nearly run out of gas. I popped the trunk, because they used to bring gasoline with them”—she started shaking, and I realized what they must’ve used that gasoline for—“and I saw the money. There was stolen money and the car had my prints, and I didn’t know what to do. I was near the woods, so I ditched the car, and I buried the money. And that’s where I was found, running down the side of the road….I was so scared, being alone for the first time. And then, all of a sudden, I wasn’t.”

  Then she turned back to Samuel. “After Kelsey was born, when I was sure nobody was watching, I went back for it, just to check. And it was still there. I told you: I buried it, and then I took it back. That’s not a lie.” She looked to me, pleading. “What choice did I have?”

  But what she didn’t say, what only I knew, was she had also taken his registration, as proof. A trail leading to his car, wherever it was abandoned. A trail leading to everything she had done, and everything that had happened to her. A way out, if ever she needed it. There was always a way out.

  She started to laugh then. Raised her arms. “You want that money? I told you I’d bring you to it. Here it is. You’re looking at it.”

  The walls of concrete, the gates of iron, the bulletproof windows…all of it could be traced back to them. This house was never ours. This house had always been the lie. We had been living in this place built on blood money.

  Martin jerked her head back by the hair again, but Samuel held out his hand. “Martin,” he said in warning.

  “No,” Martin said. “She’s always been a weakness for you. You said they’d have the money. You said.”

  But Samuel looked unaffected. The others may have been here for the money, but I had a feeling Samuel was here for something more. I’d heard him from my hiding spot upstairs: that there was no way my mother could get him what he truly wanted. He was here for something more. For us.

  “You are so small,” Samuel said to my mother. “I always underestimate you.”

  He slid a knife from his back pocket as he walked toward her. I saw a gun tucked into the waistband of Martin’s pants. And Eli…what did Eli have? The scent of cigarettes…

  I didn’t have to
overpower them. I didn’t need muscles and doors. There’s a way out of everything. She had taken it, once. It wasn’t perfect, maybe wasn’t even right, but she saw the chance, and she took it.

  She built our life out of blood money, and I existed because of it. Everything that sustained me, from the walls that surrounded me to the blood running through me, came from darkness and lies.

  But this is what nobody else understood except me.

  She had built herself a cage, with bars and concrete and locks. She had been serving time for it. Seventeen years’ worth. A life sentence.

  For me.

  Stories take on a life of their own, but this one was mine.

  —

  I lunged for Eli, my hands going around his waist, dragging down his body, trying to force us both to the ground. There was yelling—someone calling for Eli to stop, someone calling for me to stop, but I didn’t. He stumbled, braced himself against a wall, and he fought me off easily. But he didn’t hit me, wasn’t too rough, and I thought it was because Samuel was watching.

  From the ground, I saw Samuel and Martin exchange a look. A frown. The room filled with tension, but I stayed curled up on the ground, trying to catch my breath. I kept my hand tucked against my stomach.

  I needed one thing. Just one. And now I had it.

  “What are you doing?” Samuel asked as I pushed myself to standing. His face twisted in confusion.

  I let out a noise that sounded almost like laughter.

  I felt the dust and grime from the basement floor like a chill on my skin. Felt the bruises like a challenge, the fear like something whispering my name, urging me on.

  “Find something to bind her arms,” Martin barked at Eli.

  “Wait,” I said, and everyone froze. I felt their eyes shift from my face to my hand—at what I was holding out in front of me, over an open box. My hand was trembling, but I didn’t know if it was from the fear or something else. Something stronger, simmering in my blood.

  “Do you know,” I said, “what you’re standing in the middle of?”

  Samuel turned the knife in his hand, the blade catching the light in the corner.

  “My entire basement is combustible.”

  I thought of Ryan, slowly backing away. The fire extinguishers throughout the house. As if all of it was waiting for a spark.

  There were the stairs behind me, and the hole in the floor in the room to my right—and then there was this.

  I held Eli’s metal Zippo lighter in my hand, flicked it once, watched as the flame danced over the metal. “Nobody moves,” I said.

  Martin had his gun aimed at me, but Samuel raised his hand. “You want to play, kid? Let’s play.”

  He took the gun from Martin’s hand and pointed it at my mother.

  “What will you do, I wonder,” Samuel said. His head was faintly cocked to the side, as if he really was that curious. Curious to see what I was made of. And I was scared to find out. Fear reveals things, but so does what we do with it. So does this.

  What was I afraid of?

  That I would not be forgiven.

  That I might make the wrong choice.

  That I had taken too great a risk.

  That nobody would truly love me, once they knew me.

  That I might be made of too much darkness.

  “Kelsey,” my mother gasped in warning. But wasn’t this what she had prepared me for? Not just to run, but to stand my ground? She taught me, above all, to survive. She taught me to weigh risks, and dangers—to see them everywhere. To act.

  And I was doing it.

  Eli’s head twisted toward the stairs first. Then Martin’s. And then I heard it, too. Sirens, faintly calling. Getting closer. But I didn’t feel any relief. Instead, the tension grew, the room practically tingling with a new blind rush of terror.

  They had no reason to hand us over. They were violent, the police had said. It was the reason my mother left them in the first place—because they had blood on their hands, and now so did she.

  This was about to become a hostage situation. And they had no remorse, nothing worth bargaining for. They had a gun, a knife, two hostages, and walls closing in on them.

  All I had was the lighter and some hope.

  “How did you get out of here the last time?” Samuel asked. He seemed too calm, like the fear could not touch him—and that made me suddenly more afraid. As if he was missing some basic human emotion, and its lack had turned him cold and remorseless.

  “Drop the gun and I’ll show you,” I said.

  He smiled. “You know I’m not going to do that.”

  I looked from him to my mother to the stairs. I could not go with him. I could not. If we went with him, we were dead, or we were taken. Either way, we were gone. This I was sure of.

  Everything my mother had taught me, all the things she’d fought to keep hidden, all of it was leading to this. Right now.

  “Mom,” I said in warning.

  Martin still had ahold of her.

  My mother closed her eyes.

  I had become the thing we always feared. The danger in the world. The unknown, existing out in the vastness. An unforeseen turn of events.

  A shadow in the corner of your eye—blink and you might miss me.

  The flame still flickered in my hand. And then I dropped it.

  In the event of a fire. Stay low to the ground. Know the exits. Crawl toward safety. Know the way by heart, by feel.

  But nobody prepared me for the thickness of smoke, how it suffocates even as you escape.

  Nobody prepared me for the heat.

  Nobody prepared me for the sound. A crackling. A whoosh. The screaming.

  Nobody prepared me for the thousand doubts that piled one on top of the other in the moment that followed, insisting I had made the wrong choice. The fear that threatened to paralyze me once more.

  There was a series of explosions as one box ignited, and then another, and another—chemicals bursting as the fire spread throughout the room.

  I heard footsteps on the stairs, and I called for my mother. Her name scratching against my throat. The smoke choking me as I sucked in air to call for her again.

  I sank lower, my face pressed to the concrete, and I wondered what I had traded my shot at safety for. What we all had traded.

  Somewhere, a fire alarm blared. Somewhere, sirens approached. Footsteps fled. The heat radiated all around me.

  Move, Kelsey.

  I started crawling in the opposite direction from the footsteps—to the closest exit. I felt for the sides of the open safe room along the floor, the metal hot to the touch, and scrambled for the compartment in the floor. Shut the door against the fire. Shut the door against the smoke. It’s the safest choice.

  I couldn’t do it. “Mom!” I called again, but the fire was too loud—I was shrinking into myself, my world growing smaller—

  I couldn’t see anything, just felt for the compartment—my hands connecting with warm flesh, jerking back.

  “Kelsey?” A low voice, a cough.

  “Mom?”

  The safe room door slammed shut, the noise trapped behind it, though the smoke and heat lingered. I couldn’t see her in the dark, with the smoke billowing all around us.

  Her hands brushed mine on the floor, and she said, “You found it.” She coughed again in the thick smoke, even though the door was closed.

  “Kelsey, listen,” she said. But then there was yet another explosion from just outside the door. The entire foundation shook, rattling my bones.

  “We have to move,” I said.

  —

  I made my mother go first, because I remembered the feeling I had, sitting on the ledge. Debating whether to go. I didn’t want to give her the choice. I didn’t want to know which one she’d pick.

  I slid down after her, breathing in the smoke-free air. Her hand connected with the side of my face first, then gripped my shoulder. “There’s a tunnel,” she whispered, leading me in the darkness.

  “I know.”


  She paused, the muscles in her arm stiffening. “When Samuel asked how you got out, was he talking about this?”

  My eyes watered, tears rolling down my cheeks—from the smoke, or something more. “They got in,” I said, and the words pushed their way out with a sob. I hiccupped, trying to force it back, but even my breath rattled. “Ryan, Cole, Annika, and I were trapped in the safe room, and they were right outside the door.”

  “But you found it,” she said, sounding breathless. “You got out.”

  I pulled away from her, started crawling through the tunnel, hearing the crackle of foundation somewhere above. “Cole was shot. And you were gone,” I said. “You just left me there, and I didn’t know what to do.” My hand over my mouth, my head shaking back and forth. I was glad for the darkness, for the noises above. I sat back on my heels, feeling her somewhere nearby.

  “No,” she said. Her hand was around my elbow, and she was holding on tighter. “No. I ran, Kelsey. Because it was the only thing I could think to do. It was my biggest fear, Samuel coming back. Samuel coming back for you. I ran to draw them away from the house. So they wouldn’t find you as you tried to come back inside.”

  I didn’t move. Didn’t know what to believe after all the lies, all the stories. The version from the police, from Jan, and now the one from her.

  “Kelsey, we’re running out of time.”

  I pressed my face closer, made my voice lower. “They’re going to arrest you, Mom. The money…they know.”

  “It’s okay, Kelsey.”

  “No, it’s definitely not okay!” If I had no father, and no mother, and nowhere else to go—how was that possibly okay?

  She nudged me on the shoulder, a little rougher than I expected. “Move, Kelsey.” Her words rang in my ear, as they had earlier. Instinct. Muscle memory. We had no light, and the tunnel was endless. I started moving faster, more frantically, thinking the tunnel was longer than I remembered—wondering if there was a fork I didn’t know about, if I was heading in the wrong direction.