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Lexie felt her blood run cold. She kept perfectly still. Nico’s mouth had started trembling, tears welling behind his closed lids. Her heart broke.
Connecting the dots herself, she whispered, “You didn’t make it there in time. Did you?”
He gave a small shake of his head. “She fought him off, tried to run but . . . That son of a bitch tied her to a kitchen chair and he . . . he—”
“I know.” Lexie touched her fingers to his lips. “You don’t have to say it.”
She knew there was nothing she could do to ease the pain he felt. The anger, the guilt, the grief that weighed so heavily on his shoulders was too much. What had happened to him, and the things that had happened because of him, could not be undone. So, Lexie did the only thing she could do; she held him.
“I wanted to be the one to notify her parents,” he said. “I owed them that much.”
Lexie’s eyes widened. Like the last piece of a puzzle sliding into place, suddenly it all made sense. “That’s what you were doing here that day.”
“And I failed that too,” he said resentfully. “I drove five hours up the coast, caught the afternoon ferry, but with the storm, the sleet . . . I didn’t know where I was going, couldn’t see shit. I took my eyes off the road for a second to check the GPS. Just one second.” He turned his face away. “They heard about their little girl’s death on the evening news while I was bleeding out in a fucking ditch.”
Lexie’s breathing ceased as she traveled back in time. On the screen of her mind, she saw Nico. Broken. Bloodied. Half-dead. She grimaced at the memory, snuggling closer into his side.
“I’m sorry,” he said, minutes later. “That was too much to put on you. I shouldn’t have—”
“Stop,” she said. “I’m glad you told me. But Nico . . .”
He looked down at her, brushed a thumb over her lower lip, an intimate gesture he seemed to be growing partial to. “What?”
“What happened to Sara, it wasn’t your fault. Surely you can see that?”
Working his jaw, he dropped his eyes. “Then why can’t I stop feeling like it is?”
Lexie laid her palm on his cheek, forced him to face her. “Because you’re a good man. That’s what good men do, they torture themselves over their failures, take things personally when they have no right to.”
He shook his head. “I could have stopped it. If I’d gotten there sooner, I could have done something. Maybe she’d still be alive.”
“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe not. You don’t know what would have happened.”
“I should never have left her there to begin with,” he growled, the sheer hatred for himself seeping out of every word. “Missing for nine years and I had her. I should have at least stashed her somewhere safe.”
“You had no idea that man was going to be released. You didn’t know she was in danger.”
“But I should have.”
Lexie let his words hang in the air while she got up, reached for her robe and tied it around her waist. “Look, if you want to play the blame game for what happened to Sara,” she said, coming back to sit on the edge of the bed. “Well, welcome to the club, because you’re looking at one of the original players.”
Nico sat up to rest his weight on his elbows.
“You heard everything I said in my statement. Darcy, Isabelle and I—we’re the ones who led her astray in the first place. She wouldn’t have even been there for you to find if it weren’t for us. Who’s to say we aren’t as much to blame as you are? Even more so?”
“You were kids,” he reasoned.
“We were reckless,” she said, her tone leaving no room for argument. “And naïve to think that we could control the monster we’d created in her.”
Lexie stood, blinking back moisture as she folded her arms and paced. It wasn’t easy to admit being ashamed of one’s past, especially to someone with a moral compass as strong as Nico’s. Though after hearing his story, it seemed he was battling some nasty demons of his own in that department.
“I’m not proud of who I was back then, Nico, even if it was just harmless teenage fun. I was old enough to know better than to expose Sara to the crowds we were hanging out with, but I went along with it anyway. Maybe things would have gone differently if we’d never made space for her in our circle. Maybe she would have graduated school, married some local guy, had a bunch of kids and lived happily ever after. Or maybe she would have ended up right where she did, just on a different timeline. I don’t know. But she made choices too. She chose to run away, she chose never to come back, and she chose to be in a relationship with a criminal.” Lexie rubbed her forehead and sighed, thankful to have the speech Annie gave her to lean on. Her best friend hadn’t been wrong when she’d opened her eyes to the truth, which was that people, however young, didn’t get a free pass from taking responsibility for their own lives just because they didn’t like where they came from. If nothing else, Nico’s account had only hardened Lexie’s resolve to shed this burdenous guilt once and for all.
“The truth is,” she said. “We’re all responsible for her death in some way. You, me, Darcy, Isabelle, even her parents who she clearly wanted to escape from. But none of us were the ones who killed her. Bryan Fowler did that. Now, the way I see it, we could keep torturing ourselves over things we should or shouldn’t have done, keep going around in circles hoping to find some way to forgive ourselves for past mistakes, or”—she paused to make sure he heard her—“we could move on.”
Nico stared at her for long, meaningful seconds. “I know that what you’re saying makes sense.” He pointed to his temple. “Up here.”
She sat back down, reaching over to place a hand on his warm chest. “I think it’s only natural for it to take some time to feel it here,” she said. “I’m still working on that, myself.”
