it. I can tell he wants to talk about this exactly as much as he doesn’t want to, and I make the decision for him.
“What do you mean?”
“I made a huge mistake letting the reporter we worked with do such a huge profile on her,” he explains. “Chubs and Vi were both worried, but it felt so important to me. Ruby says it’s fine, but it’s not. I thought it would show people how brave and amazing she is, but for a lot of people in this country, it’s had the opposite effect. If they’re not scared of her, they want to hunt her for her skin. We might have been able to keep what she could do a secret from the public—the government could have sealed her records. But it’s out there now, and it always will be, and I regret the hell out of it.”
“If she says it’s fine, you should believe her,” I say. It hasn’t seemed like she’s holding any kind of grudge to me. I’m sure there’s a swirl of emotions churning beneath her calm surface, but from what I can tell, she’s the calmest—the most serene—of all of us. It’s easier to feel braver when I see the steady courage in her. “You can’t make decisions about her life for her.”
“I know, I know—I just want her to think twice before making these calls, really put the danger into context,” he explains. “She’s made peace with what she can do, but she had to fight so damn hard to get there. I know I was the definition of an ass earlier, but I just don’t want her to feel like she has a responsibility to help every single person she comes across, or that she owes it to Cruz or whoever to fight for them.”
He takes a deep breath, raking his hand back through his shaggy hair, muttering to himself now more than to me. “She’s fought enough. We’ve all lost enough, haven’t we?”
I can’t argue with him there. If anyone deserves a warm cup of milk, a nap, and a lifetime supply of cookies, it’s probably these kids.
“What did you lose?” I ask him, and no sooner are the words out of my mouth than my brain fires, connecting two wandering dots in rapid succession: newspaper articles, Stewart.
In the back of my mind, I’d thought he looked familiar. That I’d seen his face somewhere, and just chalked it up to the news. But now I have context, and understanding blooms in my heart.
“Was your brother the one that was killed?” I strain back into my memory for the name. “Cole?”
“Ah…” Liam swallows hard, rubs his hand over his face. “Yeah. Yeah, he was.”
“So we have something in common,” I say. “Your brother was like Luc, right?”
He nods, glancing up at the ceiling of the tree house. And now I’m the one who feels like crap, like an idiot, for snarling at him in the car.
“But…not like Luc?” I press.
“Not from the sound of it,” he says finally. “We didn’t really have…I guess we didn’t really even have a relationship? I don’t know. He was never straight with us. He didn’t even tell me he was a Red until the day before he was…until he…”
“Don’t say passed away,” I tell him, drawing from my own terrible well of experience. “Say he died. Death is horrible. We shouldn’t give it a pretty name. I only know what was in the paper and on the news, but from the sound of it, it was horrible. Those people stole his life.”
“I stole it.” He breathes the words out like a secret he’s kept too long. “He died protecting me. Covering me so I could get out. There’s not a day—” Liam sucks in a sharp breath. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to get angry—this isn’t the reason I came out here.”
“You should be angry!” I tell him, and the monster inside me nods in agreement. “You should be furious!”
“But I’m angry with him,” he confesses. “That’s what’s so wrong about it. I am furious that he hid what he was and felt shame over it, when our family would never have loved him less for it. And I can’t even tell you how unfair it is that I only got ten hours with him—ten hours—after I finally found out.”
I can’t begin to imagine this. The second we found out what Lucas was, what he could do, the only thing that changed in our lives was Mom scraping