Page 126 of Revere

Sound muffles.

Vision blurs.

An unnatural calm washes over me as I climb the basement steps and reach the top. As I take the marble path a final time. The front doors swing open, and there’s so much light on the other side I wonder if it’s the gates of heaven opening.

Is it possible I’m the one who died? That God has decided I’m worthy after all.

For my suffering.

For what she put me through.

Or did I wash forgiveness away with my sins?

It isn’t until Jacob strides through the front door of my parents’ house that I know I’m still here. That my mother isn’t.

After spending so many years in front of a cross, I wonder which way she’ll go. Is there any peace to be found when she never truly understood the meaning of it?

“Patience.” Jacob wraps me in his arms.

Did I shove myself against him, or did he thrust himself at me? We’ve always been two magnets that can’t resist each other. It never mattered if we made sense; we always ended up here.

His fingers wrap into the back of my hair, and reality settles. I’m pulled back to earth as the first tear slips free.

Bodies slowly start to fill the house, which means he didn’t come alone. But he doesn’t move. He stands in the center of the chaos, holding me.

“She’s dead.” A sob rips free.

How can I cry for a woman who spent my life hating me? Who did everything in her power to make me feel like nothing?

Somehow, I do, and that hurts even more.

I curl my fingers into Jacob’s shirt, crying as I tell him everything. How Mom fed the lies to my father that got Molly killed. How she arranged the abortion. How she thought she was in love with him, and that she would rather kill me than watch us be together.

I tell him everything, and when I finally calm down enough for him to bring me outside, I tell him everything about my scars and how I got them. About my childhood spent trying to find forgiveness for sins that were never mine. I tell him about my mother’s obsession with him and what she did because of it.

Then, he tells me about my father. From torture to truths, we bare it all. For the first time in our relationship—in my life—everything is out in the open.

At some point, Maddox brings the gun outside and explains to Jacob why it backfired. My father’s gift to my mother had been tampered with, and I wonder if my father was smart enough to be the one to do it. If he always sensed the disconnect and feared she’d turn it on him someday.

Or maybe he loved her so much that he worried she’d turn it on herself, so he made sure it would blow off her fingers instead of her brain.

Either way, it’s ironic that his paranoia saved my life.

I sit on the front steps of my parents’ house long after we stop talking. Long after I’m done crying.

Sigma House members filter in and out, but the police never come, and Jacob never leaves my side. This is just one more secret in a long list that will be buried. And here I sit, beside the man who is going to oversee them all.

“Do you hate me now?” I ask finally, leaning my head against Jacob’s shoulder.

He continues to spin my wedding band around my finger. “How could I ever hate you?”

“I’m the reason my mother took everything from you.”

Jacob reaches for my chin, angling it up. He wipes his thumb across my tear-stained cheek and looks into my eyes.

“I could never hate you, Patience Stone.”

My chest flutters at the sound of his last name on mine. While he still plans to go by Jacob, he’s agreed to accept his family name again for the House. So that’s what I am now too. A Stone at the foundation of the fraternity I once hated.