and there would be no escaping for him. The only thing he could do was take me down with him. If I’d gone to the police first, the mall never would have happened. It’s my fault, Willow. It’s all my fault.”
“Stop,” I begged. “Don’t say that.”
“It’s true. I had all the evidence I needed to stop Malcom. But instead of turning him in right away, I gave him time to gather his weapons, create a plan, and kill forty-eight innocent people.”
“Caven,” I breathed, his palpable anguish slashing through me.
Like the rest of the world, I’d learned a lot about Malcom Lowe after the shooting. I was a kid when it happened, but as I got older, my curiosity about that day grew to unhealthy peaks. The computers at the library had become my best friend and greatest enemy. The world was at my fingertips, but I didn’t need to focus on the world. I needed to focus on Willow Anne Banks—a child who was quickly falling down the rabbit hole of guilt and blame.
But in all of my years spent at those computers, I’d never, not once, seen anything about Malcom having committed any crimes before that day at the mall. Which meant…
All at once, my stomach rolled as understanding dawned on me. Nothing would surprise me when it came to Malcom Lowe.
But I shattered for Caven.
“You never told anybody?” I whispered.
He rubbed his eyes with his thumb and his forefinger. “He’d already left us in Hell. He couldn’t hurt anyone else, but Trent and I were two scared kids, worried that the world was about to crucify us for the sins of our father. Neither of us wanted to add to the list of his victims. Trent made the decision and burned the pictures. After multiple surgeries on my abdomen, I was out of it for several days. I almost died twice. When I finally came to, he’d told the police all about the fight that morning but decided not to mention the pictures. What was I supposed to say? ‘No, officer, the only person I have left is lying’?”
He rumbled deep in the back of his throat, his frustration thick as if it had happened yesterday. “Then when he showed me the devastation of the families from the mall as they spoke to the news on TV, I truly thought he’d made the right call. The families of Malcom’s original victims had already come to terms with the fact that their loved ones had died by accident or suicide. Imagine the agony of finding out that the man who had killed your loved one lived just down the street for almost a decade. He’d even been over to some of their houses and attended their children’s birthday parties.”
I covered my mouth, bile burning a fiery path up the back of my throat. “Oh my God.”
He hung his head. “I could have stopped him, Willow. I could have stopped him, but instead, I’ve spent the last eighteen years covering for him. You call me a hero. But I’m not. I helped one little girl and killed forty-eight others.” He tipped his chin to the brick house outside my window. “If you want a hero, he’s in there. But it’s not me. And you deserve to know that it will never be me. I’m not just a hypocrite because you forgave me for the unimaginable. I’m a hypocrite because I’ve lived the last four years of my life trying to protect Rosalee from the monsters in this world, all the while carrying the secrets of my father, the biggest monster of them all.”
His breathing was ragged by the time he fell silent. His blue gaze boring into me almost begged me to berate him the way he so thoroughly believed he deserved. But all I could think was how maybe those forty-nine feathers tattooed on his arm were the right number of victims after all. Because, even eighteen years later, Malcom Lowe was still killing his son.
“Okay,” I croaked out before clearing the lump from my throat. It wasn’t the time for me to break down.
He’d just confessed his deepest and darkest secret; the last thing he needed was pity.
He did, however, need a good, long reality check.
I reached for his hand and he tried to dodge me, but in the confines of an SUV, he had nowhere to go. Curling my fingers around his, I kissed his palm. “I’m glad you told me this.”
“I’m not,” he replied, looking very