Sometimes he wakes up in the middle of the night and thinks the baby is theirs.
A month after Shelly Pomeroy's party, he waited for it. Waited for Veronica with her newly short hair to grab him and pull him into a dusty corner or behind the bleachers, and hiss words like paternity and responsibility and financial support to him. He took alternate routes to class so he couldn't catch her eye, and when they were in sight of each other his palms were always damp, his skin singing with anticipation. The month stretched to two, then three; by the summer she remained slender as ever. School started again and they were in journalism together and she was indifferent, her belly flat, no dark circles under her eyes bespeaking of late nights wondering about him.
He never admitted, not even to himself, how much that did hurt. As though she didn't want to acknowledge at all what had happened between them that night. He caught the occasional glance, but that was all.
When he dreamed about it, there was reconciliation and peace and her standing at a window, looking out to the sea and smiling, an infant in her arms. Her hair was long and Lilly was still alive and his mother had never called him to the table for that terrible conversation, the one that had left him weak and nauseated and disgusted with himself.
But it all faded. He started a new journal on his computer. He took more assignments for the newspaper. He ran for class president. He was civil to the girl whose heart he had broken, and who had broken his heart in return.
And he fell for Meg Manning.
He never asked himself why it was another cheerleader with long blonde hair. He never let himself think about it. Meg was a wonderful girlfriend; his parents liked her, her parents tolerated him, and she didn't dig too deeply into the tangled misery that was his past. Meg knew he'd loved Veronica, but everyone did. What she didn't know was that, during the string of relationships he'd carried on after breaking up with Veronica, those persistent dreams had never stopped. Meg didn't know that he had probably killed one sister in a blind rage and deflowered the other during a drunken party. When he was with Meg, none of those things seemed to matter anymore. He could start fresh. And if Veronica never wanted to acknowledge that they'd had sex that night, then neither would he.
Which is why it was a total surprise to him, the night he saw Veronica kissing Logan, that he proceeded to walk out to his SUV and smash the driver's door in with a shovel. Through that same choking rage he distantly heard Meg say, hurt in her voice, that he was still in love with Veronica. Despite everything, despite all his attempts to put her out of his mind, all the promises he'd made to Meg, the hours they had managed to steal in each other's arms. None of it mattered anymore.
He wanted her still.
It made him sick and angry and disgusted with himself. He and Meg fought constantly. She was convinced she was right and he could never admit that she was.
Then came the terrible night when they saw the tapes and Veronica told him that the rights she had signed away weren't worth the billions he'd thought they were, that she wasn't his sister.
Everything came back, that night as he watched the police arrest his father, Veronica's father on a stretcher and Aaron passed out cold in the middle of the road and Veronica herself, still in her ridiculous waitressing outfit, her face flushed with tears as she climbed into the back of an ambulance.
They had lied, about so many things. He hadn't killed Lilly, although his parents had been willing to stake Abel Koontz's life on the belief that he had. There had never been any incest.
And Veronica had never acknowledged their one night together because she'd never known it had happened.
"I do still love her," he told Meg, finally. "And it's unfair to both of us to keep going this way. We aren't happy." He looked down at his hands and sighed.
Her face had gone ashen-pale. "I thought you loved me," she said. "I thought..." She raised her hands in a vague hopeless gesture. "Remember that day on the beach? You told me you were over her. Have you been seeing her again?"
Duncan shook his head. "I haven't. Meg, I swear, I'm not breaking up with you to be with her."
He had never seen such fire in her eyes. "Yes you are," she said softly. Bitter. "I hope she's worth it."