“Let him go,” I said.
The words were unplanned. They spilled out of my mouth without any thought on my part. But once they were out, they felt right. And I knew I’d had to say them.
“Let him go,” I said again. “And then leave my family and everyone else alone. I’m the person you want. I’m the one you need to deal with. Okay? Just let . . . just let everybody else be.”
Aaron looked surprised by my declaration. For a moment, he stared at me as though I were an exhibit on display in a zoo, a strange creature who performed some bizarre, unexpected act. I kept my eyes locked on his, so I had no idea what Blake was doing.
“A hero, then,” Aaron said. “Saving the day for everybody.”
“Not that. Not that at all. It’s just the right thing, okay? Your quarrel is with me. I’m the most to blame for what happened that night.”
For some reason, Aaron continued to hold the gun against Blake’s head. Maybe he deemed Blake the greater threat. Or maybe he felt he could keep me from running off by maintaining the pressure on Blake. If I made a sudden move, either to leave the basement or to charge Aaron, he could easily pull the trigger and kill Blake with a head shot. Maybe he figured pointing the gun at me wouldn’t have been as much of a deterrent for Blake.
“Are you?” Aaron asked.
“Don’t you know what really happened? After all these years, don’t you?”
“I know now,” he said. “I was pretty well concussed that night. And drunk. So I went along with what I was told by the cops. What they thought happened. But somebody finally filled me in. But you tell me what you think happened. Let’s see if it matches what I know.”
“Who told you?” I asked. “Was it Dawn?”
Aaron’s face scrunched. “Dawn? The sister? Forget her. Just tell me the story.”
His desire to have me speak first so he could compare stories put me further on edge. I wanted to ask more questions, to know where he’d been hearing things from. But the look on his face, the primal urgency displayed there, told me I needed to speak.
But I remembered the letters . . . what Blake said had been written in them.
Had Aaron read the letters? Had he been in Jennifer’s house?
Had he killed her?
“Go on,” he said, waving the gun.
“Okay, okay. We were all drinking. You know that. And we pushed you to go out of town and take that sign from Gnaw Bone. Look, we knew how much you wanted to get into Sigil and Shield. We played on that. We all did. It’s no different than that gun you have there. That gun can get us to do a lot of things, if you’re willing to use it. We used your desire for acceptance in the same way. I pushed you to do those things.”
“The accident,” Aaron said.
“I was drunk too. And it was fuzzy for me. But we were in my car. And when I woke up in the hospital that night, I could remember that we’d all walked to the car together. I remembered getting in. And I was behind the wheel. And I remembered driving away from campus.”
“You did. You were driving.”
“So it’s me. I’m the one you have the problem with. I should have been arrested. Let Blake go.”
“Let Blake go? What about this . . . ? How did the cops come to think I was driving if you were really the one behind the wheel?”
His words froze me, and I looked at Blake, who was staring at the floor.
“Well?” Aaron said.
“Blake moved us,” I said. “Before the cops came, he moved me to the back and you to the front. He staged the scene. And when the cops arrived, they found you behind the wheel. You were so out of it you had no idea. Blake told me when I came to in the hospital. And we went with that. . . .”
“You went with that,” Aaron said. “You make it sound so fun. So casual. Oh, we just went with that.”
“Aaron, it was wrong. I wanted to tell the truth. My father had died. I was barely paying for school. I covered my own butt because I was afraid I’d lose everything. Everything my mom was working for to help me finish school. She went back to school, worked nights and weekends.
“It was stupid and selfish and wrong of me. And many times I wanted to call the police and tell the truth, but I always found a reason not to. I’m not proud of it. Not at all.” I felt sick just saying the words. But I was also glad for someone else to hear them. For Aaron to know the truth. “Call the police. Bring them here, and I’ll tell them the truth. There isn’t a statute of limitations in Kentucky. I’ll go to jail. I’ll lose everything. Just make the call and end this. . . .”
Something flashed in Aaron’s eyes, something I hadn’t seen in the short time we’d been face-to-face in the basement of the half-completed town house. It looked more like joy than the anger that had been simmering there, and for a moment, I couldn’t understand the reason for the look. And I never would have understood it if he hadn’t started talking and explaining it.
“That’s what happened that night?” he asked.
“It is. Ask Blake.”
Aaron’s eyes trailed down to Blake, who still cowered under the pressure of the gun. He looked small and insignificant on the floor, like a child.
I waited for him to say something, to speak up and interject as he always did, but he remained silent, as if the pressure of the gun against his head cut off his ability to speak.
“I did ask him,” Aaron said.
“And he told you the same thing, right?” I asked. “He had to.”
It took a moment for Aaron to answer, but then he did. “We ran into each other. . . . What was that, Blake? A couple weeks ago?”
When Blake stayed quiet, Aaron pushed against his head with the gun. “Yes, weeks.”
“An accident, really,” Aaron said, not relaxing the pressure against Blake’s head. “I was over in Cave Springs, working my job in a shitty Chinese restaurant. A job as a dishwasher, which is about all you can get when you’ve served time in prison. And never finished college. So I’m outside, taking a smoke break, when I see this one”—he pushed against Blake’s head again—“walking through the parking lot with a beautiful woman. I recognized him right away. He hasn’t changed much since college. A little fatter. A little shorter if that’s possible. But the same guy. Same shit-eating grin on his face, like he didn’t have a care in the world. A rich kid’s look. That sums it up, right?”
“Yeah, sure,” Blake said.
“You nearly jumped out of your skin when I called your name,” Aaron said. “Like you’d been electrocuted. And I kind of wondered why you jumped so high. You and that woman you were with suddenly looked like you were in big trouble.”
Why would Blake have jumped and looked guilty when someone called his name unless he had been with Jennifer and not Sam?
“At first he didn’t want to talk to me,” Aaron said. “But then he sent his ladylove over to his car so he could speak to me alone. And when we were there talking, and I asked him about that night and what really happened, he suddenly seemed very eager to tell his tale. I just really wanted to know what the truth was. Because I’d started to have my own doubts while I was in prison. I’d replayed it over and over, and I started to remember that you, Ryan, were behind the wheel when we left Sigil and Shield.”
Everything grew silent. The absence of noise felt oppressive, like an unseen force filling the wide-open basement. I waited for Aaron to go on, but he didn’t. I couldn’t stand the waiting and the silence.
“What did he tell you?” I asked. “The truth, right? What I just told you.”
Aaron cut his eyes toward me, and then he nodded slowly, like a man who knew a secret.
“That is what he told me,” Aaron said. “He told me the same version you just gave. The truth.”
But Aaron laughed a little after he said it.
“The truth,” he said again, looking down at Blake. “Is that still the story you want to stick with?” When Blake said nothing, Aaron asked, “Well, is it, Blake?”