“You’re sharing the ice cream,” I told her. She twirled the spoon back and forth in her fingers, and I wondered if she was planning my demise.
“Dean’s not talking to me, either,” I told her. “And I’m just as frustrated as you are. Everything we’ve done—everything we tried to do—it was for nothing. The UNSUB isn’t in that class. It doesn’t matter that Geoffrey has minimal empathy and a fascination with the dark side, or that Clark had a thing for Emerson and a lot of pent-up rage. None of it matters, because neither of them killed Emerson.”
The one thing the FBI had allowed us to do was a wild-goose chase, courtesy of Dean’s psychotic father. And I couldn’t help feeling so stupid for thinking that we could just waltz onto a college campus or look at some internet profiles and find a killer. Dean was still furious with us, and we had nothing to show for it.
“Lia—”
“All right, already,” Lia said, cutting me off. “Enough with the bonding, Cassie. I’ll share the ice cream, but we’re eating it somewhere else. I’m not in the mood to play well with others, and the next person who asks me to share something dies a slow, painful death.”
“Fair enough.” I cast a glance around the kitchen. “You have someplace in mind?”
At first, I thought Lia was leading me to her bedroom, but once she shut the door behind us, I realized that wasn’t her endgame. She shoved open her window and, with one last wicked glance over her shoulder, climbed out onto the roof.
Great, I thought. I stuck my head out the window just in time to see her disappear around a corner. I hesitated for a split second, then climbed carefully out the window myself. The roof’s slope was gentle outside of Lia’s room, but I kept a hand on the side of the house anyway. I edged my way toward the corner I’d seen Lia take. When I’d made the turn, I let out a heavy breath.
The roof flattened out. Lia was sitting with her back up against the siding, her mile-long legs stretched out nearly to the edge of the gutter. Watching my step, I made my way toward her and slid into a sitting position myself. Wordlessly, Lia tilted the carton of rocky road toward me.
I dug my spoon into the ice cream and gouged out a hefty spoonful.
Lia delicately arched one brow. “Someone’s courting an ice cream headache.”
I nibbled a bite off the end of my spoon. “We should have brought bowls.”
“There’re a lot of things we should have done.” Lia sat perfectly still, her eyes fixed on the horizon. The sun was just now setting, but I got the distinct feeling that if I hadn’t been with her, she would have stayed out here all night, two stories off the ground, her feet brushing up against the edge. She was a person who hated being boxed in. She hated being trapped. She always had an exit strategy.
She just hadn’t needed one in a very long time.
“Dean will get over it.” I said that instead of the other things I was thinking—about exit strategies and Lia’s childhood and the way that she had, in all likelihood, learned to lie. “He can’t stay mad at us forever,” I continued. “We were just trying to help.”
“Don’t you get it?” Lia finally turned her head toward mine, her dark eyes gleaming with tears she would never let herself shed. “Dean doesn’t get mad. He doesn’t let himself. So if we went to talk to him right now, he wouldn’t be angry with us. He wouldn’t be anything. That’s what he does. He shuts down, and he shuts people out, and that’s fine. I get it. Of all people, I do.” Lia closed her eyes and clamped her lips together. She took several ragged breaths and then opened them again. “But he doesn’t shut me out.”
Dean knew Lia better than any of us, and that meant that he knew exactly what shutting her out would do. He knew that he was the one person she trusted, that their relationship was the one thing that kept her from feeling trapped all the time. Michael’s defense mechanism growing up had been to recognize anger, and if he couldn’t defuse it, to provoke it. Lia’s had been to bury herself away under so many layers of deception that whatever anyone else did to her, they couldn’t really hurt her, because they couldn’t touch the real girl.
Dean was the exception.
“When I came here, it was just Dean and Judd and me.” Lia abandoned her spoon in the carton and leaned back on the heels of her hands. I wasn’t sure why she was telling me this, but for once, I knew in my gut that everything she was telling me was true. “I was ready to hate him. I’m good at hating people, but Dean never pressed. He never asked me a single question that I didn’t want to answer. One night after I’d been here a couple of months, I went to sneak out. Running away is something I’m good at.”
I filed that away under the growing list of things I knew about Lia’s past.
“Dean caught me. He said that if I was going, he was going with me. I called his bluff, but it turned out, he wasn’t bluffing. I ran away. He followed. We were gone for three days. I’d lived on the streets before, but he hadn’t. He stayed up nights so I could sleep. Sometimes I’d wake up and I’d see him keeping watch. He never looked at me the way most guys look at me. He was watching out for me, not watching me.” She paused. “He never asked for a thing in return.”
“He wouldn’t.”
Lia’s smile was brittle. “No,” she agreed. “He wouldn’t. The last day before we came back, he told me about his dad, about how he’d come to be here, about Briggs. Dean is the only person I’ve ever known who’s never lied to me.”
And now he wasn’t talking to her at all.
“Agent Sterling was one of his father’s victims,” I said softly. Lia’s eyes flew to mine. From the sharp intake of breath that followed, I knew that she’d recognized my words as the truth and didn’t know how to handle it.
Telling Lia didn’t feel like betraying Dean. She was his family. She’d opened up to me in a way that Lia didn’t open up to people, and that told me how badly she needed to know that he wasn’t shutting her out just because she’d screwed up. Dean’s life was a minefield right now.
“Sterling has a brand, right here.” I held my fingertips to my chest. “She got away somehow. I think Dean helped her escape.”
Lia digested that information, her face unreadable. “And now, she’s back,” she said finally, her eyes fixed on a place in the distance. “And all Dean can think is that he didn’t help her enough.”