Page 39 of Sharp Lies

I looked up and found Warren at my side, his face still as stone as he stared at my van.

The stillness should have been neutral. Instead, it was so intense I wondered how my van wasn’t exploding where it sat. He looked both furious and controlled at the same time, like he was a ticking time bomb that someone was keeping right on the edge of detonation. If I was heartbroken and horrified, he was...

So coldly angry that I was a little bit scared for whoever came up against him.

When he looked at me, though, his face turned gentle. “Come on. Inside. There’s no point in standing out here in the rain. Getting soaked isn’t going to change what happened.”

He was right, and I let him tow me up the ramp and into my mom’s house, where we found my mom, shockingly, sitting in her wheelchair in the foyer with a stack of towels.

I rushed to her and dropped to my knees. “Mom, how did you—”

“I’ve been working on getting out of bed on my own while you weren’t looking,” she said sharply. “And I heard that crash and worried that it was you. What happened out there? What was that noise?” Her eyes turned to Warren, and she looked him up and down. “Are you okay?”

“Well, it wasn’t me going through the glass, if that’s what you’re worried about,” he said with a smirk. “Let’s get out of the foyer and into a place where we can build a fire. It’s not good for anyone to be soaked all the way through like this.”

Mom and I followed him out of the foyer and into the living room like we couldn’t think for ourselves, though part of me appreciated having someone there who was keeping his head so level in the situation. I was ready to break down and panic, and my mom looked like she was so worried she could hardly think straight. No surprise, honestly, as she’d seen what Tony had done to me five years ago and knew he was bothering me again. She was probably terrified that he’d done something to me while I was outside.

He had. Just not in the way she was thinking.

Once we were in the living room, Warren got my mom settled on the couch while I got to work starting a fire. It was the middle of the summer, and we didn’t really need warmth, but Warren was right about one thing: He and I were both soaked through, and even in the July heat, we were going to end up sick if we didn’t get dried out. I had plenty of clean, dry clothes upstairs, but I didn’t want to leave Warren and my mom down here on their own. There was too much chance of Tony still being around and breaking into the house and causing trouble when my mom was defenseless.

I also didn’t want to go upstairs to change on my own.

Too much chance of Tony already being up there, or on the roof of the porch, waiting to break into my room the moment I was alone.

The thought made my stomach turn, and I felt the panic rising, making it hard to breathe, but I turned my mind toward building the fire and getting us all warm. I couldn’t change what he’d done to my van, and I couldn’t alter the fact that it was the middle of the night and we wouldn’t be able to do anything until morning. I could, however, make sure this fire was lit and we were all warm, and being able to control that one small thing made me feel better. I laid out the logs and set a lit match on the gas pipe, then turned the gas on, smiling a bit at the whoosh of the suddenly lighting flame.

It wasn’t how most other people would do it, maybe, but I’d always loved being able to stand back and watch as the flames lit, rather than holding a lit match to gas and then jumping out of the way when it suddenly caught.

I was standing there staring at it when Warren walked up behind me and slipped his arms around my waist, pulling me back against him.

“You okay?” he whispered.

I thought about saying yes, that I was fine and that Tony couldn’t scare me. I really wanted that to be the truth. I wanted to be brave in the face of something like this. But the truth was, he’d hurt me so much when we were together and scared me so consistently, that part of that had sort of soaked into my bones and stuck. Even after five years, he had the ability to catch me by surprise and frighten me, and his willingness to be plain old mean made it even worse.

“No,” I told him, speaking honestly. “That man scares me. I don’t like that he got onto our property so easily, and I don’t like that he thought he had the right to hurt my van like that. I hate that it was an attack against me. I hate that he’ll get away with it because the cops are evidently on his side. And I hate that it bothers me so much. I want to be strong and brave and more like... more like...”

More like you, I didn’t add.

After all, I didn’t know Warren all that well. I didn’t know if he actually was that brave or if he just did a good job of acting like it.

Though he made me feel safe and secure, like he could handle anything life threw at him and then some.

“More like someone who’d go out and kick his ass if they found him putting an axe through their windshield?” he asked.

I smiled, despite my panic. “Exactly.”

He turned me around and looked down at me, every angle of his face sharper in the flickering firelight. “I think that’s exactly who you are,” he said. “If you give yourself a chance.”

My mother cleared her throat to my right, and I looked over, feeling suddenly shy about how close Warren and I were standing.

“Does someone want to tell me what’s going on?” she asked pointedly. “Between you two? With the van? And in general?”

Warren took two big steps back from me, looking abashed. “Sorry, Diane. I know that must have seemed awfully forward. I don’t mean for you to think—”

She waved him off. “Warren, I know there’s something going on between the two of you. My daughter went running out of the house like her hair was on fire when the thunder started, thinking you might need someone to help you. She doesn’t do that for just anyone. I’m just wondering if you two have actually talked about it.”

Warren looked at me, his eyebrows high, and I gave him the same expression back. Because we definitely hadn’t talked about anything. We’d just been sort of... going off our instincts.