Listen for the Lie(91)

He swung a tree branch, heavy and thick.

It connected with her skull.

She grunted as she hit the ground. I scrambled to her. She slowly sat up, blood pouring from a cut on her head.

Emmett stood over us, breathing heavily. He’d tossed the tree branch aside in favor of the hammer again.

I wrapped my arms around her, protecting her. “Please stop,” I begged. “We won’t tell anyone if you just stop, okay? We were planning on leaving anyway. We’ll just go and you’ll never hear from us again. I promise. Please, Emmett.”

He stared down at me, his eyes black in the darkness.

“Lucy?” Matt’s voice rang out in the quiet. “Savvy? Emmett? Are y’all out there?”

I froze. We’d run back to the car, not to the main road. The car I’d heard was Matt’s.

“Ma—”

Emmett cut off my scream with a hammer to the skull. It barely grazed the left side of my head but still knocked me back. Savvy caught me before I hit the ground.

“Matt! Help!” she screamed.

Emmett lifted the hammer again. I swayed. I was dizzy. I opened my mouth to scream, but nothing came out.

I looked up. Emmett had his arm drawn back, eyes locked on mine.

“You made me do this,” he growled.

The hammer was coming straight at my head.

Savvy shoved me out of the way. He smacked the hammer into her head so hard that the crack reverberated through the trees. She collapsed across my lap. Blood pooled on my dress.

My hands were covered in blood.

There was a buzzing in my brain.

“Savvy?” Matt’s voice was still distant.

Emmett looked over his shoulder, cursed, and then swung the hammer again.

Everything went black.





CHAPTER FIFTY


LUCY




“You’ve been trying too hard to remember things,” Emmett says.

I’m out of the car. I don’t remember getting out, but now I’m standing next to it, and Emmett is looking at me worriedly. His fingers are wrapped around my wrists.

“It’s not good for you,” he continues. “Remember what happened last time you tried too hard? You started creating things in your head.”

The crack of the hammer against Savvy’s skull is replaying on a loop in my brain.

Too real to be something I created.

“Matt told you I was there that night, didn’t he?” Emmett asks.

I blink. “What?”

Emmett’s expression goes dark. “He told you I was there. He promised he wouldn’t, but I should have known that asshole wouldn’t be able to keep a secret.” He puts both hands on my cheeks. “I would never hurt you, you know that.”

“Matt told me you were there,” I repeat, even though it’s a lie. Matt didn’t tell me shit.

Emmett was there? And Matt knew?

“I left the wedding for like twenty minutes because I had to go home to let my dog out,” Emmett says. “I saw you … Well, you don’t want to know.”

“Yes, I do,” I whisper.

“We fooled around, at the wedding,” Emmett says. “We were … Well, we kept doing that. You remember, the times before that. You and I are always making our way to each other.”

That was one way to describe my getting drunk and kissing him twice, I guess.

“Savvy saw us, and she got really mad. I don’t know if she ever told you, but she and I had a brief fling. It was nothing, just a couple of times, but she acted really cold to me after. I think maybe she thought it was more than it was?”

That was one way to describe Savvy avoiding him after bad sex.

“You two left together. I decided to run home to let my dog out, and I came across Savvy’s car on the side of the road on the way out. I thought it was weird, because most of the guests took the main road out. It was supposed to rain that night, and the people at the venue had told us not to take that road, that it flooded easily. I guess she forgot. I forgot, until later that night.”

“You came across her car, already parked,” I repeat.

“Right. I got out, and you two were off in the trees, yelling at each other.”

“About what?”

“I don’t know. It was too hard to follow. But you seemed really upset. She slapped you, and you scratched her. I started to intervene then, but you grabbed the tree branch and just … I don’t think you meant to hit her that hard. You panicked, and started screaming, and you ran.”

“You forgot about my head injury,” I say to Emmett.

He drops his hands from my cheeks. “What?”

“My head injury. You forgot that I got bashed in the head too.”

“Oh.” Something like panic flits across his expression and then disappears. “I don’t know how that happened, but you were running like a bat out of hell. You must have hit your head on something. I actually tried to chase you, but you took off.”

“And you just left Savvy there to die?” I ask.

“She was already gone,” he says quietly. “There was nothing anyone could do.”

“And you didn’t go to the police because…?”

“Because I love you.” His gaze is steady on mine. “I don’t care if you made a mistake once. Technically, she hit you first. And you didn’t mean to do it. I know that.”