Page 68 of Lifeline

“We,” he scoffed quietly, but I’d heard him.

“Yeah, we,” I said, frowning. “What the hell is going on?”

His head snapped up, and I could see the barely contained anger in his eyes. “I don’t know, Aidan, why don’t you tell me?”

Unease grew into worry. “What do you mean? You’re the one with an attitude.”

“And are you the one with secrets?” he hissed, his expression collapsing as he sucked in a controlled breath. “Shit.”

“Shit,” I said slowly, my heart pounding in my chest. “Mika⁠—”

“It’s funny,” he said in a quiet, controlled voice. “I thought I’d spend some time while I waited, to read through the stuff you’ve been writing. Didn’t think twice about unlocking your laptop to read your work. I mean, you gave me the password after all. What was the problem? And you had been writing, you’d been doing a lot of writing in fact. Little did I realize that at least half your writing was telling someone else all about us here.”

My heart plummeted, rooting me in place. “Mika⁠—”

“Is that all you’ve got?” he demanded. “Just my name in that sad voice?”

“I wanted to tell you,” I said, desperation creeping up to wrap its hands around my throat. “I wanted to talk to you about it, and I wanted to quit. I’ve been trying to…I don’t know, soft-launch stopping, but if I stopped, where the fuck would I be? Not here, that’s for sure.”

“Should you have even been here in the first place if all you were going to do was air our laundry to someone, dirty or clean?” he asked hotly, and my stomach squirmed at the disgust on his face. “Christ, Aidan, we trusted you. We treated you like one of ours from the start. And you’ve been playing TMZ with our personal and professional lives?”

“Not personal,” I refuted immediately, and then grimaced. “Not…really personal.”

“No, just enough that if someone wanted to, they could make connections. Or at the very least, they could wonder how personal all of us are getting, at the expense of job performance,” he snapped. “Do you really think someone wants that kind of information because they like workplace gossip? That information might be uncomfortable for you to tell, but in the hands of someone who wants to start shit, they could, a lot of it.”

“I wanted to stop.”

“And you haven’t.”

“And I wanted to talk to you about it.”

“And you didn’t, not until I brought it up.”

True on both counts, but I was finding my anger. “I’m trying to explain.”

“Don’t,” he said, turning his head away and closing his eyes. “I won’t tell the others, not right now. But if you don’t fucking do it, I will. I thought I could trust you, Aidan. I really did.”

“I…you can,” I said, but even to my ears it sounded weak and pitiful. “I’m not unaware of how fucked up the whole thing was, and I’ve been trying to make it right, okay? I just…I didn’t know how. It was stupid to agree to it in the first place, I get that, I really fucking do and if you read as much as you make it sound like you did, then you know I didn’t like it and I’ve been giving less and less, and you know I wanted to own up to it.”

“Then why haven’t you?” he asked through clenched jaws.

“Because…” I said, then stopped, the words freezing in my throat because why would I say the truth when the truth wouldn’t matter? When it would fall on ears deafened by betrayal and anger, ears I would have had for him once upon a time. Why be vulnerable, say the full truth when it would simply be ignored or thrown back in my face and used against me?

And I had barely asked myself that when, for the first time, the answer came clear as day.

Because it didn’t matter what he did with the truth, because it was the truth, and it was better to live in truth where it hurt than to feel safe in a lie.

“Because of you, all of you,” I said simply.

“You…spied on us and kept that from us because…of us? Make that make sense.”

“No, I kept tabs and made reports on all of you because I knew it was the only way to have and keep this job,” I corrected immediately. “I kept it a secret because of all of you…but I guess, mostly because of you.”

He hesitated, looking wary. “Elaborate.”

I bit back the urge to reiterate that it was stupid and fucked up to have agreed to the stipulations of the job and did as he asked. “Because as much as I wanted to tell all of you…especially you, and as much as I wanted to say, fuck it and just…stop. I knew that if I said I wasn’t going to do it anymore, my position would be yanked out. And I knew the chances of me being welcome here if I told the truth were next to zero, and I⁠—”

I couldn’t look at him, not when he was as disappointed, angry, and disgusted with me as I was with myself. I turned and walked back toward the window, finding the sight of the unnerving storm more comfortable than Mika’s face. “I can’t remember the last time I felt this at home. It’s like,” I cleared my throat against the choke, but I couldn’t fight the sting in my eyes. “It’s like being home; I don’t know how else to put it. Like there’s somewhere I could actually be…me, all of me. Where I have people I can rely on and who rely on me, where it’s give and take equally, and where I just…like I saw a whole future here, with all of you…with you.”