Page 19

19

Lilah

Lilah had been standing at her parents’ graves since the sun came up.

“All I ever wanted was what the two of you had,” she was telling them. “I don’t really remember you, Mom, but Dad told me once that he loved you from the moment you met, and that he loved you every day afterwards, even when you were gone. He said you’d loved each other so much that even though you died too young, you’d had more love than most people get in a lifetime. I thought that was what was supposed to happen. You met someone and they were The One, and after that, all you had to do was love them with all your heart.”

She brushed a speck of dust off her father’s perfectly clean headstone.

“I believe Marina and Opal. They’ve shown me concrete evidence that Zachary has been doing these things. And maybe not just to us, but to other women, too. He never cared for me at all. He just wanted my money, and he took as much of it as he could get. But I still love him. Maybe I’m foolish, like Opal says. Maybe there’s no such thing as real love. Not for me, anyway. Maybe what you had was so rare that I’m never going to find it for myself.”

She clenched her fists.

“Or maybe you lied to me, Dad. Maybe there isn’t such a thing as pure, true love. Maybe this was a story you told to me, like a fairy tale, to help me sleep at night. Maybe if Mom had lived, the two of you would have disagreed and fought and hurt each other. Maybe you wouldn’t have even stayed together.”

She felt like she wanted to cry, but somehow she couldn’t. It was as if there was a little unknown kernel of hardness in her that she’d never suspected before. She didn’t like it.

“One of the most difficult things to get my head around is that Zachary said, over and over again, that he was going to protect me. I thought I’d found someone who really understood me and who I could trust. But he only saw me as something to exploit. He took what he wanted, like...”

She couldn’t complete the sentence, or say the other man’s name. She hadn’t said it in years, because just saying it made her feel all over again that she was nothing, she was nobody, she was erased.

She took a deep breath.

“I don’t blame you, Dad,” she said. “It’s not your fault that you were killed. It’s not your fault that you were fooled by Zachary, too. You were a good man, and you trusted other people. And you were a good woman, Mom. I do believe that. But after what happened with Zachary, I don’t know if I believe in love anymore.”

She took off her engagement ring. It felt too heavy and looked too flashy. It always had, but only two days ago, she’d thought that her ring’s excess was to show the bigness of Zachary’s love for her. A love hard as diamond, as precious as gold.

It was all a bunch of clichés. And both the love and the money to pay for it had been stolen from her.

She looked around. The cemetery was empty of living humans, but she whispered anyway.

“I don’t know if I can trust Marina and Opal. After all, I’m keeping a secret from them too.” She touched her fanny pack, which held the secret. “And I don’t know what we’re going to do with Zachary. I hope we can make him apologize and give back all the money he stole. If he really did steal it. But what if he won’t? What if he says that he’s going to tell the police what we did? I don’t—” She took a deep breath and said what she’d been afraid to even think, since leaving Marina’s house. “I don’t know what the other two will want to do. They’re both so angry, and Marina has a lot to lose if she gets found out. I’m afraid...I’m afraid that they might hurt him. I’m afraid that they might think they have to kill him.”

The last two words made her shudder.

“But Opal’s right. I’m too scared to do anything about it. I’m too scared to do anything at all. I’ve been scared for most of my life, like a helpless rabbit. But I think the thing I’ve been most scared of, for all my life, is being alone. And now I am.”

Lilah knelt on her parent’s grave. She lay her ring on the grass between the two stones. Maybe it be trodden into the dirt. Maybe it would be found by someone. This was a waste, she knew: she could sell the ring and give the proceeds to charity. But she didn’t want to poison a charity with her own disillusion and disappointment. It was better if the ring and all her hope that went with it, stayed here in the cemetery among the dead.

She kissed her fingers and pressed them first to her mother’s grave, then her father’s. The gesture made her feel a little better. But she was still confused and scared. She realized that she didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t. She hadn’t since her father had been murdered, and maybe for a while before that.

So she stood up, brushed off her knees, and went to the only place that she knew where she could find the truth.