by Ava Lohan
“I will find the strength to talk to Jenna, and you will find the strength to tell me how you feel.”
He walked away without looking back. I heard the apartment door close.
I went to get my phone, then headed back into the shower. Two. Four. Zero. Nine. Zero. Zero.
I was afraid. But I had to do it. If there was something that was stopping him from being happy with me, I would find it behind that door. About half an hour passed since Kegan had left the apartment. I was sure he wasn’t coming back anytime soon.
I saved the code in my phone and waited a bit. I’d wanted to run to the door the second he'd left, but I couldn’t risk him coming back. In the thirty longest minutes of my life, I dried my hair and put on some comfortable pajamas. Then I went to get a pair of scissors from the kitchen: I wanted to see everything in that room, even the closed boxes.
It was time to open the door. My veins were pumping with agitation. It reminded me of the time I stole a tube of lipstick when I was fifteen. The same adrenaline mixed with fear. The same sense of guilt for doing something I knew was wrong. The same dread of being caught. My lipstick heist had gone off without a hitch. Now, once I’d opened the boxes and had gone through them, there was no going back. Kegan would eventually find signs of my intrusion. But I needed to do it. For me. For us.
I set my guilt aside and took a deep breath.
Two. Four. Zero. Nine. Zero. Zero.
The door clicked. My heart jumped.
I went in and turned on the light. I didn’t waste time with Kegan’s childhood photos and went straight for the boxes. This time there were only two. I could have sworn there were more the first time, but I could have been wrong. I sat down and opened the first. I felt like a child on Christmas morning, although I didn’t expect any nice surprises. Newspaper clippings. I frowned and pulled them out. They were about a car accident on September 24, 2000.
“Shit,” I said as I realized what I had in my hands: an article about the accident that had killed Kegan’s parents. The last name of the deceased man confirmed it. My brain immediately made the connection with the code. I jumped up. “Oh, shit.”
I felt like I’d just done something abhorrent, like murder someone. I paced back and forth, looking at the pieces of paper that would soon incriminate me. Kegan would be furious. I was disappointing him again. Maybe this would be the end of our relationship. He’d never talked about his parents’ accident and I’d avoided talking about mine. All he knew about my parents’ accident was what I’d told him that day in the Red Room. Now I’d just stuck my nose into his painful past. But I never could have imagined finding this, and now it was too late to rethink and retrace my steps. No, I could only move forward and finish what I’d started. I swore again and knelt down to put the papers back in the box. I had to find tape to hide my intrusion. But I would do that later.
I made my way to the second box. Folders, files on employees who had been fired. I put them down and held my head in my hands. What was I doing? What was I hoping to find? Why couldn’t he love me? Why couldn’t he be happy with me? Why, after two months, did he still think that something between us was wrong? Maybe Kegan didn’t have any secrets. Maybe he just didn’t want to say things that he didn’t feel, as simple as that. I’d convinced myself we felt the same way, even though he’d never said anything openly. What if I was wrong? What if I was the only one who had fallen madly in love?
My inner voice kept telling me I was stupid. I told her to shut up. Kegan loved me, damn it, or he would have never asked me to stay. He'd stopped selling himself for me. He’d welcomed me into his home. And I was the only person in the world, besides Finn and his cleaning staff, to ever step foot in his apartment. I even lived there. He loved me—I had no reason to doubt it. The only thing to doubt was his inability to tell me.
I got back to work. So far, I had only found employee files and articles about his parents. I was done with the cardboard boxes. I made my way to his toy boxes and opened them one by one. No surprises there. I had to search the rest of the room. I took a deep breath and turned the corner that Kegan had come out from two weeks earlier. In this part of the room, the walls were covered with pictures of different places from around the world, hanging like posters. Each one was marked with a date. I touched his Eiffel Tower poster, dated five years ago. It wasn’t hard to figure out that these were souvenirs from Kegan’s travels. I forgot about the pictures and went on to see the rest of the room.
There was a desk with a MacBook next to a cracked window. A pack of cigarettes and a lighter rested on the windowsill. Then I noticed a small table in the middle of the room. In the middle of the table there was a single red rose in a transparent vase, all covered by a display case. Petals lay on the tabletop. I ignored the flower and looked around; there were two more boxes. My search had come to an end. I knew that if there was an answer to my question, I would find it in those boxes or on his computer. Brandishing my scissors, I got to work. I breathed heavily as I cut through the tape. On one hand, I would have loved to find more ex-employee files, and on the other I would have liked to find something else. I wanted my answer now, right in front of my face.
Box number one: more files, but they didn’t have anything to do with work. I took a closer look. There were names, each paired with a dollar amount and a rose petal. Petal number one, petal number two, and so on. I frowned and stood up, holding the files in midair. What the hell did all this mean? I felt uneasy.
Box number two: like jumping off Amicalola Falls to commit suicide.
“It’s not possible…”
I kept repeating it, but it was true. The newspaper clippings I was holding in my hands were as real as the blood pulsing through my veins at the speed of light. I couldn’t look anymore. I felt sick. My hands shook. I left the papers on the box as thousands of questions flooded my mind. Kegan had articles about my parents’ death. And not just one. He had several. Cut out of different newspapers, just like he had done with his parents’. I stood up, my legs shaking, and went to his MacBook. It was on and charging. A USB drive lay on the desk, practically begging me to plug it in. My hands fumbled around as I went for it. My mind kept going back to the images of my parents’ crash. Why did Kegan have those articles and photos? I understood—obviously—why he had saved the articles about his parents, but why did he save the ones about mine?
I thought back to his insistence that the accident wasn’t my fault, that I shouldn’t take my vows because of that guilt. Could it have anything to do with the reason he had these articles? My body was covered with a thin layer of cold sweat from head to toe.
“Jesus,” I said.
The USB drive had a folder with my name on it. I grasped my crucifix and clicked, plunging head-first into an abyss. There were pictures of me. Pictures of me in my habit. Pictures of me outside the church where Kegan and I had met the first time. A whole series of secret shots. I leaned back in the chair and closed my eyes. There was no logical explanation for any of this. I tried to speak but couldn’t form a coherent sentence. The world swirled around behind my closed eyes. I struggled to breathe but I had to keep going. I was still clutching the crucifix around my neck. I couldn’t stop. Kegan had been following me. Maybe he’d had me followed. Had he really been that obsessed with me? I brushed my hair back and continued my search. There was a file inside the folder: Rose Davis. I opened it and the world stopped spinning. My crucifix fell from my hand. I thought I might faint.
Over one million dollars.
I kept reading but just couldn’t understand. It was all there. Everything about my life. From my graduation day to the lies I’d told after my experience with Malcolm Hitt. Kegan knew it all. He knew there was more to the story between me and Jenna. He knew about all the lies I’d told. God only knew how. He’d been planning to give me a million dollars for a long time, just as he’d given money to the other people on the list.
“Jesus Christ,” I called out in shock, begging him to help me. I needed him
to save me or I was going to go crazy.
My birthday. Kegan knew about that too. So, he’d known for sure I’d been lying the whole time we were out on the motorcycle. How long had he known all this about me? Was it a recent thing, or had he known the whole time? I shivered and had to rub my arms to warm up again. Statements from Father Abel about my confessions. It was too much. I closed the laptop and slapped my palm against my forehead.
The girl feels guilty about the death of her family. I felt like throwing up. She would like to make up with her friend. That’s all she talks about. My stomach twisted. I pushed the laptop away and rested my head on the table. I needed to take it all in. Process it. Again and again. Perhaps forever.
Just then, Kegan entered the room that he had tried so hard to keep secret. He’d been hiding an archive on me, like the psychopath he probably was. I jerked my head up for a split second, remembering that I’d left the scissors on the box, far from my reach. I sank my nails into my thighs until I had the courage to look him in the eyes. If he were ever going to kill me, the time was now.
Hardly a half hour earlier, I’d been sure that he loved me. Now I wasn’t sure of anything, except for what I had seen in his so-called childhood toy room. He looked alarmed, but not as much as I was. I had thousands of questions, but I couldn’t get out a single one. Not then.
“You weren’t taking a shower—you were looking for the code.” His indifferent tone was proof that Kegan had given up, that he’d known it would only be a matter of days before I got ahold of his phone. That, sooner or later, he would have slipped and I would have found the code.
Kegan went over to the rose. I stayed frozen in the chair.
“It’s a stabilized rose,” he said, removing the display case and picking up a petal. He looked at it like it was calling out to him. Or maybe, he was just looking at it because it was easier than looking at me. “A rose that doesn’t need any water and lasts for years. I got it shortly after my accident.”
“Why do you have articles about my parents? Why do you have a file on me?” I asked, my voice cracking.
“I thought helping random people would help me feel better. Making people’s lives easier, offering them alternatives,” he said, shooting me a brief glance before looking back at the flower. “But it didn’t do shit,” he concluded, crumbling the petal between his fingers. “Giving a hundred thousand dollars to someone and plucking off a petal didn’t help me at all.”
“Why do you have a folder with my name on it?”
Kegan shook his head and ignored me again. His hands were now pressing so hard on the table that they turned white. His lips were pressed together so tightly that they practically disappeared. “The day we met, I really did want to freak out the priest, but I also wanted to see if confessing would help me.” He was thinking about unpleasant things and was doing his best not to return my gaze. He looked at the rose, the petals, the marble table, and the display case. Anything that wasn’t me. “Then I went back to church. The priest’s absolution was a disappointment. My conscience wasn’t cleared. The nightmares didn’t stop. So I kept going with the petals. And I just couldn’t get you out of my head. I’d committed serious sins in my life, and your biggest worry was mocking a nun’s cooking.” Kegan smiled tensely. “I couldn’t stop thinking about what it would have been like to have sex with you. To bring you to my world and see if I would have ruined you, or if you would have made me better.” His eyes darted to the open boxes. “When I figured out that random acts of charity weren’t working, I called a detective to find the people that I really wanted to help.”
I put my elbows on the desk and ran my fingers through my hair. I looked at him through a veil of blond hair that I just didn’t feel like moving. “The folder with my name, the information on me. You know everything,” I said, my voice trembling with anger. “You invaded my privacy. And for what? To find out I lied about sex? That I went out drinking and dancing before I was old enough? That I love blueberry pancakes? What did you expect to find out? You wanted to help me? Offer me an alternative? Why? Was I too cute to stay in your little convent?”
“You don’t understand, Rose.”
“You’re right, I don’t,” I said, glaring at him.
He held a newspaper article in his hands. “If it were all that simple, it would be so much better. But that’s not what this is about.” Kegan shook his head and swore. The article fell to the ground. Then he said something I could have never expected. “I killed your parents, Rose.”
“You’re lying,” I said, shooting to my feet. I put a hand over my aching chest. My head was exploding; I couldn’t stop shaking it.
“That’s what this is about.”
It was the cruelest lie anyone had ever told me. “My dad…” I started, but I couldn’t go on. I swallowed hard.
My dad had had a heart attack. The autopsy had confirmed it. He’d had a heart attack, swerved into the opposite lane, and hit a car head on. I thought about Kegan’s motorcycle accident. I pulled my hand away from my chest and looked at my fingers. They were spotless, but it felt like they were covered in blood. Like Kegan had just shot me in the heart. Yes, Kegan had also been in an accident, but it’d had nothing to do with my parents’ accident.
“I was with Finn in Jacksonville Beach for the weekend. That night, I’d planned to end it all.”
I covered my ears. “You’re lying!” I said over and over again, but Kegan just kept talking, hurting me more and more with every word.
“I was going too fast on the wrong side of the road. There was nobody out that night. Then I saw the car coming, but I didn’t go back into my lane. I wanted to crash into them. I wanted to kill myself. Then the car swerved, and you know the rest.” I couldn’t stop shaking my head. “Stop, stop, stop it!” I screamed. “Stop lying!”
But Kegan didn’t stop. He was cruel. A cruel liar who was forcing me to relive my parents’ accident. He insisted that everything he’d said was true. I couldn’t look him in the eyes, not for a second. He sounded desperate. “We were in shock, me and the driver of the other car. We called for help, but the man was already dead, and the woman…” He spoke like he really had been there. But I knew it couldn’t be true. I stifled a cry. He was a really good actor. “The ambulance didn’t get there in time. I watched her die. I heard her last words. She kept saying, ‘My daughter, my daughter.’ The other driver and I didn’t know what to do.”
Picturing my mom in her last minutes of life was like reliving the whole experience all over again. I looked at him like I wanted to kill him. The tear running down his cheek had nothing to do with me or my personal tragedy. My tears, on the other hand, were the same as the ones that had flooded my eyes when the police had found me in the diner and told me that my parents were dead.
“I called Finn—he got there after the ambulance.”
“Shut up,” I hissed, leaping on him to cover his mouth with my hand.
He grabbed me by the wrists. “My grandfather used his connections to keep me out of trouble. It’s true that your dad had a heart attack, and that maybe he would have swerved anyway. But what if he hadn’t? What if I hadn’t been there and he'd just kept going straight?” Trying to free myself from his grasp was as useless as screaming. His words still reached my ears. “I keep asking myself that every single day. What if? It haunts me every time I look at you. When you tell me you love me, that this thing between us is right. When you say you’re happy with me, I feel like I don’t deserve you.” He let me go and I massaged my wrists. I didn’t want to believe any of it.
“What would’ve happened?” he asked in the same cracking voice. “I think that what happened that night was meant to happen. It’s useless asking what if. That question haunts me, but it shouldn’t. I was just as responsible for your parents’ deaths as the heart attack.”
Kegan just kept rambling as I took it all in. I thought back to all the times he’d told me I couldn’t love him. To all the times he’d had trouble looking me in the eye
, and all the times he’d refused to agree that our relationship was right. He couldn’t have told me he loved me because he just couldn’t have allowed himself to, not with that secret. Now he was looking straight at me, his eyes as glossy and tormented as mine. They were honest.
“When the detective found you, I just wanted to give you the money. Then I saw his pictures and recognized you. And I wanted you, Rose. I wanted you so bad. I couldn’t help myself. I wanted to understand how you’d ended up in my grandfather’s convent. So, I did what I did. Now you know what I meant when I said I should have never brought you here. This is why I wanted you to hate me.”
It all made sense.
Kegan had killed my parents.
He didn’t want to give me the money to start a new life, but to rebuild the one he had destroyed.
Tears welled up in my eyes and started to trickle down my cheek. I couldn’t bring myself to dry them.
I’m the last person in the world you should love and the first person you should hate.
That’s what he’d said to me in the garage. But I couldn’t understand it then. No, I could have never imagined all this. He was right: this was all wrong. When I’d looked at his motorcycle, when I’d insisted he take me out on it, every time he’d been inside me. It was all wrong. Fuck me like you hate me and want to kill me. Everything was starting to make sense. You can’t love me. It was all so clear. You torture me. This was what was preventing him from leaving everything behind for me. It wasn’t just the money.
I loved him. And I hated him as much as I loved him. To hate and love someone at the same time was possible, and it was exhausting. Nobody should ever have to go through something like this.
“You took away everything I had and became all that I have.” It was difficult to speak with this lump in my throat. “I hate you.” And it was true. Never did I think I could hate him like this. It was a hatred I had never felt before. A hatred I could have never imagined even existed. It was all-consuming, the hatred, the tears, the pain… the love I was trying to suppress. Now I knew why he wanted to be hated. “I hate you,” I repeated louder.