CHAPTER 5
1056 Words
Jacob
The door closed behind me with a soft click.
It felt final.
Good.
Final was useful.
I moved down the hallway fast. Not running, but close enough that it hardly mattered. The Lockhart house was too quiet in the early morning, like it was holding its breath before everyone came downstairs and started pretending again.
I knew every floorboard. Every light switch. Every groan in the plumbing in the old part of the house. I had been coming here since I was seventeen, long enough to move through it in the dark without thinking.
Good.
Thinking was the problem.
I reached the landing and saw Lizzie at the foot of the stairs.
She was barefoot, her hair loose around her shoulders, her face bare in a way I rarely saw outside the lake house. Her eyes were red-rimmed. She looked fragile.
That was not a word I had ever thought belonged to Lizzie Lockhart.
She crossed the space between us quickly, like she was afraid I might disappear before she reached me.
“I didn’t sleep,” Lizzie said.
I stopped.
I should have kept walking.
“I’ve been awake thinking,” she said.
I looked at her hand.
Her phone was still in it.
I noticed that. Then I noticed that I noticed it and hated myself for the ugly little flicker of suspicion.
Last night had made me mean.
Or maybe it had only shown me what was already there.
“I panicked,” Lizzie said, her voice trembling. “When you asked, I panicked. Everyone was looking at me, and all I could think was that my whole life was closing in.”
She swallowed.
“But I thought about it all night,” she said. “You weren’t asking me to disappear. You were asking me to choose us.”
Her hand found mine.
“I love you,” she said. “I want to marry you.”
For one second, everything I had wanted for five years stood right in front of me.
Barefoot. Beautiful. Saying yes.
And I had already ruined it.
“I can’t,” I said.
Lizzie’s hand went still in mine.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
I should have lied.
I didn’t.
Maybe some part of me wanted the punishment.
She had come back to say yes.
And I had already destroyed the answer.
“There’s something you need to know,” I said.
Lizzie’s expression tightened. “Jacob.”
“I slept with Leah.”
The silence went absolute.
She stared at me like the words had not made sense in the order I had said them.
“You what?” she whispered.
“I was drunk,” I said too quickly. “I wasn’t thinking straight. I was upset. About us. About the proposal.”
Her laugh was sharp and disbelieving.
“You slept with my sister.”
“I didn’t plan it.”
“You don’t plan to betray someone,” Lizzie snapped. “You just do it.”
I flinched.
I deserved that.
I deserved worse.
“She knew I was drunk,” I said.
Lizzie went very still.
I heard myself keep talking and did not stop.
“She knew exactly how wrecked I was.”
Lizzie’s face changed.
“She knew,” she said softly.
There it was.
The story left my mouth and became something cleaner the second she heard it.
Something easier to hold.
Then her face crumpled.
Footsteps sounded down the hall.
Ruth and Edward appeared almost immediately, drawn by raised voices in a house where raised voices meant something had gone wrong enough for staff to hear.
Ruth took one look at Lizzie and went straight to her.
Efficient. Protective. Immediate.
She put herself between Lizzie and pain like that was where she had always belonged.
Edward looked at me first.
The disappointment in his eyes hit harder than anger would have.
Not disgust.
Not rejection.
Disappointment.
Like I was still the son-in-law he had wanted, just damaged now. Complicated. A problem to solve, not a man to cast out.
Then his gaze moved toward the stairs, toward the hallway where Leah was not here to defend herself, and something in his face closed.
“What happened?” Edward asked.
Lizzie’s voice broke.
“He slept with Leah.”
Ruth’s mouth tightened.
Edward’s face darkened.
Neither of them looked shocked.
Not really.
Angry, yes.
Disgusted, yes.
But not surprised.
That was the worst part.
They were not hearing something new.
They were hearing something they had been waiting for Leah to prove.
Edward looked toward the hall again.
“She has always wanted a place she wasn’t given,” he said quietly.
For one second, I thought he might defend her.
That second had lasted long enough that I had noticed myself hoping for it.
Then he looked at Lizzie’s face and did not.
“And she has always looked at you,” Edward said.
His voice was quieter than Ruth’s would have been. Less certain. Like he hated himself for saying it and said it anyway.
Ruth’s hand tightened around Lizzie’s shoulder.
“She’s never known her place,” Ruth said coldly.
The words landed.
No one asked where Leah was.
No one asked what she had said.
No one asked whether I had gone to her, whether I had kissed her, whether I had stayed after, whether she had told me the truth and I had chosen not to care.
The story started building itself without her.
I watched it happen.
I did nothing.
“It wasn’t that simple,” I said.
Ruth looked at me.
“You were drunk,” she said.
The room went quiet around that sentence.
I could have corrected her.
I didn’t.
Lizzie sobbed into Ruth’s shoulder.
Edward stared at the floor.
And Leah was upstairs, alone, with whatever I had left of her.
I thought of her sitting in that bed, wrapped in a sheet, telling me the one thing I knew was true.
You came to me.
I could have said it then.
I could have stopped the story before it became fact.
Instead, I stood there and let Ruth hold Lizzie while Edward stared at the floor and everyone decided what Leah had done.
The moment sealed itself shut.
And I let it.
- Writer
