me and I’ve had to live with it all these years. He would never have gone inside without gear, if he hadn’t seen me run in or heard the report there might be people inside. And it was all for nothing. She...my friend wasn’t even there anymore.”
“You didn’t know that at the time.”
“If I hadn’t called it in, he wouldn’t have responded. And he would still be here.”
“Someone else would have,” she said.
Yes. Someone else might have reported it, but maybe they wouldn’t have been foolish enough to say they thought someone might be inside.
His office was quiet. He knew the fund-raiser would be wrapping up soon, that he should be out in the bay talking to people and thanking them for coming. Right now, that seemed a world away. He was back in the past, trying to resuscitate a man he respected and admired.
“Your friend. The one you tried to save.”
He braced himself, knowing somehow what was coming next.
“It was Natalie, wasn’t it?”
Of course she would guess. What other conclusion would she arrive at?
He wanted to lie but, again, he was lousy at it. Yet how could he give her one more reason to resent Nat and her terrible, pain-fueled choices?
“Does it matter? It was a long time ago.”
“Yes, it matters. It was Natalie. Oh, Cooper. You were trying to save my sister.”
She wept then, as he had feared she would. Now he couldn’t help but reach for her, though he was half-afraid she would push him away. She should despise him for what he had done. She should not want anything more to do with him. Instead, she burrowed into him, sobbing quietly, her shoulders shaking, and he could do nothing but hold her.
30
OLIVIA
She couldn’t seem to breathe as emotions tumbled through her. Anger, hurt, horror. Grief.
“Did she...set the fire?”
“Not on purpose. I don’t think she even realized until after the fire that she had left a candle burning, one that ended up finding fuel in old newspapers others had left behind.”
“She never said a word.”
“The guilt and the pain chewed her up inside. She hated herself even more after that. So she self-medicated with more booze, more drugs, more men. Anything to help her forget.”
So many things about her sister began to make sense, finally, after all this time. Natalie had gone crazy after Steve died, not following any of Juliet’s feeble rules. She had stopped going to school her senior year, had spent her days sleeping and her nights partying.
“Why didn’t she tell Mom? She would have put her in counseling to help her see it was...was an accident.”
“I don’t have a good answer to that. I think she was afraid of facing you and your mom with what she had done. So she ended up making everything worse.”
His words came back to her, about looking for a friend who had been suicidal. That had been Nat? “Wait. You said she was depressed and even suicidal before the fire. Why? What happened?”
He eased away from her, sitting on the edge of the desk, his features dark and troubled.
“Earlier that summer, Nat had sneaked out of the house to go to a beach party with some tourists, including a college kid she really liked. She drank more than she should have and...she was sexually assaulted by this guy she liked and one of his friends. It was her first time.”
She was going to throw up. She couldn’t bear it, thinking of her sister feeling helpless and afraid. “Oh, Nat,” she whispered.
“I figured out pretty quickly that something was wrong and pushed and pushed until she finally told me what had happened. I tried like hell to convince her to press charges but she couldn’t accept that it wasn’t her fault. She said she shouldn’t have been there that night and it had been her choice to drink too much. She thought your mom and dad would hate her when they found out.”
She closed her eyes, unable to imagine the pain her sister must have carried by herself.
Not by herself, she corrected. Cooper had been there for her. She held on tightly to him, feeling the tension in his muscles. He had carried Natalie’s pain, too, all this time.
“I should have been a better sister,” she said. “I should have seen she was hurting.”
“Hey, you can’t blame yourself. You were just a kid. You couldn’t have known what was in her head. What were you, thirteen when your dad died?”
“Almost. He died the night before my thirteenth birthday.”