That spring Meg unlaced her fingers from Duncan's and waved at him as she walked to her next class, and with a toss of her hair she was gone, and for an instant he thought another name, but bile rose thick in his throat and he shook his head, locking his books under his arm with a tight, tense elbow as he ducked his head and set off in the opposite direction.
Meg was not Veronica.
Meg was not Veronica.
The sight of Meg in a short cheerleading skirt and a form-fitting top might remind him in an uncomfortable way of someone else, and sometimes when he put his hand in her long blond hair and kissed her he forgot who he was and who she wasn't for a moment, but that didn't mean anything. Nothing at all. Because, Veronica, she would figure it out and have the tests done and at some uncomfortable point in the future she would be giving him a distant smile over a catered buffet table at a Kane family reunion and the memories of the night, the night that had never happened, those would just be worse. And he would still have Meg, who was sweet, and pure, and so good-hearted, and kept so cloistered that he had to sneak into her house, feeling vaguely dirty about the whole thing, when her parents were away at church.
Vaguely dirty. Everything was vaguely dirty to him now. Starting with his sister in a pep squad uniform, lying in a pool of her own blood, and the looks on his parents' faces, and the terrible assumption they hadn't even needed to voice.
Meg, Meg was different. With Meg he could start over and it would all be right again. Replace the two girls with the long blonde hair, with yet another. Meg would never moon passers-by from the window of a limo on homecoming night, Meg would never get so drunk that she would sleep with her own half-brother. Meg was good, and sweet, and Celeste almost, almost liked her, and she fit into the kind of life his parents had laid out for him a long time ago. A senatorship, a devoted scandal-free wife, epilepsy kept firmly under control and a pill every morning to make himself forget the kind of anger that would make him bash his sister's skull in with an ashtray, eventually the presidency, eventually he'd make up for all the tiny minor disappointments that had so tightened his mother's mouth and made his father somehow manage to do even more for his only remaining legitimate child.
When the disappointment was acute enough, when his self-loathing had reached its peak, when the Kane legacy and all its thousand bloodsucking strings were wrapped firmly around him, he almost believed that life was supposed to be this, a succession of moments in which he convinced himself that Meg's resemblance to Veronica was coincidental and he wasn't dating her because it was easier and he didn't desperately return Meg's proclamations of love with earnest assent just to keep her with him and maintain the pretense and the lie. Meg was everything he'd ever wanted, almost.
And he almost loved her.
Inasmuch as an unconvicted murderer smitten with his half-sister could love.
"What do you want to do this weekend," Meg asked, over lunch, her smile broadening into a grin. "My parents are going to a prayer conference."
She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and he caught that sudden image, pale slender fingers against blonde hair, and for an instant he saw Veronica, her arms loose and open on the pillow beneath her, fingers gently curled near her ear, plucked brows creasing as she inhaled sharply and almost whispered his name.
"I can think of a few things," Duncan said, curling his fingers with hers, because she was his second chance to get things right. A night at the Neptune Grand, champagne and roses, and if he woke with his face buried in the silk of blonde hair and for a moment forgot whose, she would never, ever know.
--
Hannah was almost what Logan had convinced himself Lilly had been. A long time ago, though. Wild, but good at heart, underneath it all. A bit of an edge, but still sweet, with a wicked sense of humor and spectacular legs. Breaking up with her had broken his heart, but Lilly wasn't entirely his, and probably never would be. They'd broken the mold when they'd made her, and she wasn't meant for commonplace things like monogamy or honesty or respect, and even though his childhood had shown him that those things evaporated with the onset of adulthood and were only the conceit of his adolescence, she was his first love and she was impossibly beautiful and she could lie with the effortless ease of a whore.
And spread her legs like one.
For his own father.
Hannah had never been and would never be like that. Hannah was like Lilly washed of all that stain, and even if she didn't burn so brightly, she was the right one at the right time. The cokehead doctor's bright-eyed daughter, who still blushed when she said the word sex and apologized for using him just to get back at her bickering parents.
He would have felt bad about it, if he was someone else and the first love of his life hadn't been a shameless whore who had still somehow managed to turn his heart inside out on a daily basis. Lilly had been like a cigarette burn against the inside of his thigh but he'd been coming back for years for that kind of treatment, and with Lilly there could never be enough.
"All I hear is, let's have sex."
He felt disconnected from the words he mumbled. He was playing chicken with himself, to see how far he would let it go, and from the melting expression in her eyes he knew. Hannah was just another slow cigarette burn, because she would find out and anything, everything he had with her would be reduced to glares from opposite sides of the hallway and another few rounds with Kendall, his personal living breathing blow-up doll.
But he had to keep her happy, show the good doctor just how far he was willing to take this, to make it seem to her and everyone else that he genuinely cared for her.
Because he did not love her. He did not love her. This pale delicate pure child who wanted nothing more than to hold his hand in the hallway and dare him to do the things she still wasn't entirely sure she could handle.
He did not love Hannah. Not like he had loved Lilly, not like he still loved Lilly, because that came once in a lifetime and there were no second chances.
Even so, Hannah's legs wrapped around his waist as he pinned her against the wall of the elevator during the too-brief ride to the penthouse, her mouth turned hot and dark from their kisses, he thought that maybe with her he could have found a way. If things had been different, if he didn't have to sabotage everything he cared about just to make his life something approaching normal again, he could have found a way, with her.
But love hadn't been enough to stop Lilly from inflicting a thousand tiny cuts and love hadn't been enough to keep his mother from jumping off a bridge or keep his father from beating the shit out of him, love hadn't been enough to keep Veronica by his side, and love wasn't enough to make Logan pull back when Hannah said, breathless and with her heart in her eyes, that she had never felt this way about anyone else, and her mother wouldn't be home until late, and if he...
He did.
He told himself that he didn't take her to his bed because he didn't want her to smell Kendall's and his mingled sweat on the sheets. Not because it would be wrong to feel Hannah slowly bend her knees and open her legs to him in the same space where Kendall, muffling a yawn against the back of her hand, asked in a monotone if they couldn't possibly try a little something new.
Especially not because he loved her, because he didn't.
But she kept her eyes open, staring into his, the entire time, and he thought for just a minute that maybe he could.
--
Jackie had already started forcing herself to pull away when Wallace announced his elaborate plans for prom.
Part of living a lie meant that she didn't get to tell him that she had already done all this, in another life. She had done the tux and corsage and illicit hotel room. She'd even already done the first-missed-period pregnancy test, huddled against the countertop while her mother was still asleep in the next room, but that image was painful to remember. Nine months of pregnancy, four of those spent in denial, became nine months of a boarding school for the rich and privileged on the Italian shore. Her baby's father was more easily imagined as an up and coming lead actor on this season's hottest teen drama, a guy whose heart she had broken, not the stumbling teenager with his hands in his pockets, mumbling into his shirt while he broke hers instead. Easier to say that her mother was a model and her birth had been legitimate and she'd always been the spoiled only child of a baseball star. Easier to say that the afterparties always went smoother with a bottle of outrageously expensive champagne and she kept Beyonce's number in her other PDA and Johnny Depp was even cuter in person and even sexier after half a bottle of absinthe.
He knew no better, he worshipped the ground she walked on, and for a while she had become the spoiled, spiteful little rich girl she'd made herself out to be, and that meant pills and parties and having little time for a nice boy named Wallace.
Everything would have been so much easier, she thought, watching Wallace shoulder the door closed behind them, if they had met, oh, three years ago. Before "baby if you love me" meant no condom and no birth control pills. Tonight she'd made sure they had both. Even if Wallace would have made a great father, history wasn't meant to repeat past tonight, and her vacation from the reality of her life and who she had to become was almost over.
Except for tonight.
He'd never loved anyone the way he loved her, he'd never felt this way about anyone, he wished that she would change her mind and go to Hurst with him, he wished that he hadn't been so stupid when he had come back from Chicago, he wished so many things. Jackie wished for only one, but held as little hope as she possibly could.
Wallace wasn't meant to devote his life to the single biggest mistake and single greatest achievement of hers. He was meant for bright flashy agents and sneaker endorsements and sweet beautiful girls whose hearts would shatter or beat at his glance. She was strong enough to get on that plane without him, and he was strong enough to survive once she was gone, and it wouldn't be so hard to find a way to fake a French postmark and make up a few more lies. A few more on top of this mountain would be as nothing.
But no lies tonight she told herself, smiling at the grin Wallace couldn't stop from crossing his face, at his struggle with the corkscrew, at the way he was so eager to get out of the tux he had been so proud to wear.
No lies tonight.
"I love you, Jackie," he said, when her dress was nearly off and the champagne was nearly finished and she was nearly, very nearly, the girl she had been that night three years ago. She pushed her hair out of her face, and she had so thoroughly misjudged him. He was supposed to be a player, a guy whose love would last only as long as it took him to roll out of bed and pull his pants back on. He was supposed to be the basketball star and she was supposed to be the arm candy, not the untouchable who got herself knocked up freshman year and had been a social leper ever since. He was supposed to fit so well with the new Jackie.
He fit so very, very well with the old.
"A penthouse suite at the Neptune Grand, champagne, and your very fine self," she murmured, and slipped her dress all the way off. No lies tonight.
"I think I might love you too."
He laughed, and tomorrow the lies will start again, and he can be in love with another Jackie, a Jackie who can write him eloquent letters from the Sorbonne. Because he'll find someone else eventually, after tonight.
Her someone else is waiting for her in New York, and he's already been waiting too long.
--
She had always thought there was something wrong with her, and tonight, standing in a shower unwrapping a stingy bar of antiseptic hotel soap, she was nearly sure of it.
This, whatever it was, this humiliation, this complete and utter failure, would never have happened to Cindy Sinclair.
She tried not to think of herself that way, because her mother (her other mother, her not-real mother, the woman who had accepted a payoff to keep quiet about a baby switch in a hospital eighteen years ago) had always treated her as though she was her own child. But now, now that she knew, there was a reason why nothing fit. There was a reason she didn't feel at home in her own skin.
She was living someone else's life.
Cindy Sinclair wouldn't have needed to save her allowance and birthday money for two years to afford her first computer. Cindy Sinclair wouldn't have needed to sell purity test results to pay for the car she'd always wanted. Cindy Sinclair wouldn't have been a social outcast.
Cindy Sinclair would have been able to figure out what Cassidy wanted, what Cassidy needed, the right way to behave around him, the right thing to say or do, months ago. She would be poised and self-assured and witty and she wouldn't need a scholarship, and she would have been able to laugh off Butters' invitation to the prom and buy herself another cell interceptor that afternoon at the mall. Dinner on a real pirate ship, her ass.
She'd never even been able to speak the name aloud, though, because Cindy Sinclair didn't exist. Mac did. And Mac was the one in the shower in their hotel at the Neptune Grand, replaying everything, trying to figure out what she had done wrong.
The sound was quiet but she thought she heard the bathroom door open, and the cold air swirling around her legs brought up gooseflesh as she pushed her hair back from her face and took a breath, her heart in her throat. Maybe he wanted to try again, maybe he wasn't in the bed telling himself that no girlfriend was far better than one whose clumsy fumbling couldn't manage to satisfy him, maybe...
She pushed the curtain back and the water dripped in shining pools on the tile floor, but she must have imagined it. He wasn't there.
A second passed before she realized that her clothes weren't there either, anymore.
She gave her hair one last rinse before she shoved the curtain fully back. Okay, so, maybe he wanted to play. Maybe this was his way of telling her that she wouldn't need to get dressed again after her shower.
Cindy Sinclair would walk out of the bathroom with her hair perfect, in stilettos and nothing else, a saucy grin on her face. But then, Cindy Sinclair would just be going back for more. She wouldn't have to find a way to ignore the... the evidence of her failure.
When Mac walked out, she was in the only towel she could find, her hair still dripping wet, an approximation of a smile on her face. But that faded.
The sheets were gone. Her clothes were gone. The complimentary bathrobe was gone. Even her shoes, her cell phone, the Gideon Bible from the bedside table. Most especially, he was gone. All evidence of him, the clothes she'd helped him take off, and she looked everywhere, behind the drapes and in the shallow closet and even in the cabinet that held the television set and the spare pillows and nothing else.
She would have dressed and gone down to the party, because maybe he was there, but she had no clothes. She had a towel that could cover only half of her at any given time.
Without really wanting to she remembered the night of the carnival and Dick nearly falling out of a car, spitting and shocked, and the look of naked glee on Cassidy's face as the transvestite hooker had stepped out of the other side. He hurt me; I hurt him. It was basic, almost juvenile, but it had given her a little thrill down her spine to see it.
It wasn't nearly as cute on the other end.
His feelings are hurt. He's upset. He struck out. He took my clothes.
He took my fucking clothes.
She would be damned if she was going to go downstairs and have the entire party laugh at her, but anything she played over in her head to say to the desk clerk just came off as suspicious. She had almost, almost talked herself into calling Veronica and begging her to bring a raincoat up to the room, when Veronica herself burst through the door, tears streaming down her cheeks, almost as though she had picked up the vibration of psychic distress and had come, bearing no raincoat, but with the promise of one.
"He took my clothes," Mac said, huddled next to the bed, and found she was near tears. "Why did he do that?"
And Cindy Sinclair couldn't deal with what came next, the crime scene tape and the blood on the pavement and the gun the policeman gently slid from the loose curl of his pale dead fingers, so Mac was left to deal with it. And Mac dealt with it.
By the time she did, Cindy Sinclair was gone for good.
--
At first it was cute. Keith was working long hours, and Jake always said he was as well, but the business was really taking off and it was all on the backs of the programmers anyway, and they could handle it just as well without him staring over their shoulders. And besides, he didn't really love Celeste, not the way he loved her. They had been sweethearts for practically forever, Lianne was his first and only love, he'd only married the ice queen because she had come to him with a positive pregnancy test, and he only felt alive when he was with Lianne...
Eventually it all blurred. Because it was all excuses. If he really loved her... well, she had no doubt that he did love her, but if he had loved her enough, Celeste's pregnancy wouldn't have kept them apart. A squalling baby named Lilly wouldn't have kept them apart.
Neither would the sweet, sad-eyed deputy who had confessed his love to her like some impossibly beautiful secret and had been a sympathetic shoulder when everyone knew about Jake and Celeste.
But they came here so often that they had a "usual room." A happy husband wouldn't have a usual room for his mistress. A happy husband wouldn't have a mistress.
Keith was happy. Between the vodka and Jake, Lianne was too.
Jake's tie was loose and his shirt was already halfway unbuttoned when he walked in, his elbow pushing the door closed behind him. "How long until Keith expects you?"
Lianne shrugged, sitting on the edge of the bed. "Someone called in sick so he's working as much of their shift as he possibly can," she said. "We have as long as you want."
"We never do," he said.
She almost believed him. Just like she almost believed him every time he said that he would leave Celeste when Lilly got a little older, when his company had its financial backing figured out and the product was finally finished. A month, two tops. A blue moon, a white lie. But she still went home and put on the radio and made spaghetti while listening to Connie Francis and kissed Keith before she fell asleep at his side. Jake still went home and held his daughter in his arms and kissed Celeste before he fell asleep at her side.
Tonight, she could almost feel it, though. Jake would hold her and everything would be fine and Keith would understand eventually, although Celeste never would. They would have a house on the cliffs just next to the ocean and their relationship wouldn't be relegated to hotel rooms under false names anymore.
Lianne Mars lived in a third-floor walkup, scraping to afford a pound of ground beef for dinner or the next bottle of vodka. Lianne Kane would drive a sleek black BMW and hire a cook and only indulge on special occasions.
His fingers were warm on her arm, and he kissed her one last time. Lianne pulled the sheet up over her and looked at him. He would be handsome for a very long time. He would be hers for a very long time. Because nothing would ever come between them again, not Celeste Conothan, not Keith Mars and his receding hairline and quirky sense of humor and utter devotion to her.
She was just opening her mouth to tell him when Jake rolled away from her, pulled his undershirt back on, slipped his boxers back on.
"I wish I could stay here," he said, facing away from her. A gold watch linked around his wrist. A gold band around his ring finger. "But Celeste said she wanted me home early tonight. Something about a special dinner, that she had something to tell me, and for now..." The lie sounded so good on his lips, just the right shift in tone, just the right touch of concern. "For now I can't afford to upset her."
One last kiss before he was gone, slow and lingering. One last kiss. The do-not-disturb sign hanging from the doorknob, swinging beneath his hand as he pulled the door shut behind him. Do not disturb me.
Lianne raised her palms to rest on her suddenly wet cheeks and closed her eyes so she couldn't see the acoustic tile over her head and couldn't see the room, the price of their relationship, false names and never being able to rake her nails over his skin or scream too loud.
But she whispered it anyway, because it was thick in her throat, even if he would never hear it. He might spend an hour with her, maybe two, but at the end of the day, Celeste had won. Celeste was the one who looked good on his arm, by his side, the gracious hostess, the mother of his first child.
"I'm pregnant and the baby might be yours."
She took a shower and dressed like a sleepwalker while the sun set, took the back stairs down to the car. Keith was at the front desk in the sheriff's office, his cheek propped on his hand, his eyelashes fluttering against his cheek.
"Keith."
He smiled when he saw her. He always smiled when he saw her. He loved her the way she loved Jake and he would always be there, and they would never be rich, but he would be a good father. Even to Jake's child.
"Come on," she said, and ruffled his hair. "Let's go out tonight. You can get someone else to cover the desk for a while."