Page 228
No billionaires.
No boardrooms.
No scars.
No sins.
It would be the smart thing to do. The sane thing, really.
That’s how I know at once I won’t be doing it.
Instead, I reach up and cover his hands with mine. “I just kissed you on live television in front of a hundred reporters,” I say. “I think we’re past the ‘walking-away’ part.”
I watch the tension drain from Lukas’s shoulders. His eyes go bright and wet. Then he’s hauling me against him, lifting me clean off the stool and off my feet entirely, burying his face in the curve of my neck.
For the first time since I’ve known him, I feel him shake.
I wrap my arms around his neck and hold on.
We stand there like that for a long time, swaying without music, breathing without talking. Eventually, my feet touch the floor again. Lukas leans back just enough to press his forehead against mine.
I let myself stay in his embrace for another few seconds. Then I say what I have to say. “We need to find Kir, you know. He shouldn’t be alone right now.”
Lukas stiffens against me. I press on anyway.
“He’s not innocent in the least; I know what he did.” I swallow. “But Lukas… it’s like you said: He just learned his whole life was built on a lie. Everything he believed about you, about Elena, abouthimself—all of it got ripped away in front of a room full of strangers. He’s hurting. And if he’s the sensitive son you say he is, deep down, he needs something. He needs hisfather,Lukas. He needsyou.”
“He won’t want to see me,” Lukas demurs. “Not yet. Maybe not ever.”
His gaze drifts past me. He’s not looking in this kitchen—at least, not this kitchen as it is right now. If I had to guess, I’d say he’s looking at it as it was eighteen years ago, with crushed pill dust on the counter and blood on his shirt as a twelve-year-old boy called him a killer.
I’m losing him to the slipstream of time and old habits.
But I catch his wrist before he can pull too far away.
“We’ll try anyway. And if he still refuses you, then he can see me,” I say.
Lukas looks down at my hand on his.
“I have Elena’s journal,” I continue. “The actual pages. Jillian gave them to me.” I reach into my jacket pocket with my free hand and pull out the crumpled photocopies. They’re wrinkled and tear-stained and one corner is torn from when I shoved through the crowd at the precinct, but they’re legible. Everyword of Elena’s elegant cursive, deteriorating page by page, is still there. “He deserves to read them himself. In her own words.He deserves to know that she loved him enough to protect him from the truth.”
Lukas reaches for the pages. His hand hovers over them, then stops. “I’ve never read it,” he says. “I buried it with her. I couldn’t?—”
“I know.”
He pulls his hand back. His throat bobs. “You’ll bring them to him?” he asks.
“Yes.”
“And if he throws you out?”
“Then I’ll leave them on his doorstep and walk away. But at least he’ll have them.”
Lukas nods once. “Okay,” he says. “Okay.”
He reaches into his pocket and pulls out his phone. His hand trembles as he opens his contacts and scrolls. On the screen, I see Kir’s name sitting right there, right below another’s.
Elena.
