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“And now you’re telling me that he was fucking a teenager? Is that what you’re saying?”

“She was eighteen,” he muttered, pinching the bridge of his nose.

“Are you serious?” I gaped at him.

“I know! Okay?” he shouted back. “It’s fucked! But I never saw any actual proof that anything was going on, and he never admitted it to me.”

“I can’t believe this.” I glared at him. “I can’t believeyou.”

He stifled a laugh. “Me?”

“Yes, you! How could you not tell me about this? How could you let this happen?”

Micah sank into the chair beside the fireplace, a look of utter disbelief coming over him. We stared at each other, my blood boiling hot.

“That’s what we do, right?” His voice lowered.

“What?” I enunciated the word.

He flung a hand toward me. “This! This is what we do.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I snapped.

“We cover for him. That’s what we’ve always done, you and me. We take care of Johnny. We fix his mistakes. And deep down,youdidn’t want me to tell you,” he said, dealing from the bottom of the deck.

My insides were writhing now. And not just because of what Micah was saying. It was how those words made me feel. He saw right through me, like always. There was no hiding with him. Everything always felt so naked. So exposed.

“That’s why you always took the fall for him, right? Because you couldn’t deal with who he was.” He kept going, pushing farther into the territory we’d managed to avoid.

“That’s not true.” I swallowed, feeling sick.

“It’s why you left.”

“No.”

“It is. And you know it. I mean, you blew up your whole life because of him.”

“You think that’s what I did when I went to San Francisco? Blew up my life?”

Micah’s hand went to his brow, rubbing between his eyes like he had a headache. “That’s not what I meant.”

“Then what did you mean?”

“You just left, James. You couldn’t cope with what happened, so you just cut it all from your life and pretended like it never existed. Likewenever existed.”

I closed my eyes, trying to find a way to erase myself from that moment. And not just because of what Johnny did. I didn’t want to talk about the role I’d played in what happened.

“You have to stop taking responsibility for everything. What happened to Griffin was an accident. Did we do the right thing by lying? Probably not. But we can’t change it.”

I stared at him, that word—accident—twisting in my mind.

Micah looked so tired that the weight of it almost visibly dragged him down. “We’re not kids anymore, James. I loved Johnny, but he was who he was. He was erratic and impulsive. Sometimes, he was fucking selfish. You can’t just put all of that on me. Or yourself.”

I stood there, unmoving, stunned by the truth of the words. I hated them. I hated him for saying them out loud. Because we both knew they were true. I couldn’t feel the heat brimming beneath my skin or the stinging cold in my fingertips anymore. I couldn’t feel any single thing because if I did, I’d feel it all—an entire ocean of pain and regret and fear that I’d held on to like a life raft for my entire life.

“And Autumn?” I rasped. “What if he did something to her, Micah? What if he…”

His eyes focused, more alert now. “You…what? You think hekilledher?”