“I can’t.” The words slam out of me, a desperate gasp. “I can’t, James.”
“You can. It’s to protect Annie. You’ve killed to protect Annie before. This is the same thing. If you don’t do this, the other deaths have no meaning. No reason.”
“Not like this . . . I didn’t walk into a room knowing I was about to kill an innocent girl. I didn’t want to, I never wanted to, I never planned to . . . James, I never planned to. I didn’t think. If I could go back, if I could undo them, if . . .”
Clarice’s dead eyes, soft Sarah’s brown eyes, they’ve never stopped staring at me, they’ll never stop staring at me. I chose that. I didn’t want to choose it, I didn’t think about it, but I chose it.
I can’t choose this, I can’t I can’t I can’t.
“You can’t go back. You can never go back. And this is the only way to go forward.”
“Please,” I say, and I am definitely not laughing I am crying, “Please don’t ask me to do this.”
There’s a long silence, and I think he’s crying with me. I want him to be. “Fia, love. You chose me. You chose us. That was the right choice. You make the choices you need to, because you are strong when no one else is. You make the hard choices.”
I nod. I chose him. If I chose him, he had to be the right choice. I wouldn’t love him if it weren’t right.
“This is the only way for us. You have to do this. For us, for my mother, for every girl my father has hurt. To save all the ones he will hurt. We’ll save them.”
To save them. To save Annie. To save Adam. To save James. Kill Sadie to save them.
“Okay,” a voice says, and I think it’s mine.
“Okay. Okay. We’ll be okay. Go home. I’ll be there as soon as I can. We’re going to be okay, Fia. I love you.”
“Okay.” I lower my phone and stare at the screen. It goes black, and I can see my reflection. It’s wrong. I stand, drop my phone on the sidewalk, grind my heel into it until it cracks. Better.
No other options. No other options. I drift along the streets, not thinking, not planning. We shouldn’t have talked about it as much as we did. I will plan nothing. I grab a phone out of the diaper bag of a woman trying to console a screaming toddler. I don’t know why until I’m dialing the number I have memorized from the card he gave me.
I need another option. Any other option. The phone rings.
“Hello?”
“Rafael,” I say, closing my eyes against the sick swirl of wrong that leeches the color out of everything around me. There is no right choice, not for me, not now. Maybe there never was. “You said we wanted the same thing. What do we want?”
I can hear the slick triumphant smile in his voice. “We want to keep your sister safe.”
“And how do we do that?”
“By doing exactly what I tell you.”
I listen.
ANNIE
Seven Days Before
“PHONE FOR YOU,” SADIE CHIRPS THROUGH THE door. “It’s Eden.”
“I’m in the bathtub.”
“I promise not to look. I hate skin.”
I laugh, and she opens the door, putting the phone in my outstretched hand. The gloves she’s wearing are soft, but she’s got to be burning up in them al
l the time.
“You’re going to miss the winner of the cake decorating contest,” she says.