Owen, Aria, and I ate a silent dinner that night. A brooding presence hung in the air, and we all felt it. Later, in the living room, Owen fell asleep on the sofa watching a Pittsburgh Pirates baseball game. Aria retreated to her room, where she’d been spending an inordinate amount of time lately. I sat on my bed, neatly made with burnt orange decorative pillows that added a splash of color against my boring white walls that Owen insisted was a tinted shade of Chantilly lace. White was white was white, in my opinion, but it didn’t matter. Tinted or not, he vetoed my request for turquoise. Said it was too “beachy for a house in Western Pennsylvania.” As a little girl I adored a beautiful turquoise bracelet Mamma had given me, a family heirloom supposedly crafted by an honest-to-goodness Navajo Indian. I lost the bracelet and caught hell from Mamma for my carelessness. I wish I still had that bracelet. Well, like Mamma always said: “If wishes was horses, honey, we’d all take a ride.”

My cool palms sucked the heat out of a mug of coffee that was now lukewarm. It was probably too late to be drinking caffeine at almost nine o’clock at night, but I wouldn’t be sleeping tonight anyway. The pros and cons of having the conversation with Owen looped endlessly in my head.

Pros:

Ryan learns lesson

Justice

Prevent another girl from getting hurt

No more secrets

Aria should know the truth

Cons:

Truth destroys Aria

Aria feels unfixable shame

Owen kills Ryan

Owen goes to jail . . . or should this be in the Pros list?

The list of reasons to tell him was long. There was only one significant downside, but it created the biggest aftershock. Should Aria know? What if she had mentally blocked it for a reason? What if telling her utterly destroyed her? Telling her could strip her of all confidence, all innocence, all joy . . . and there was no way to return her to her former well-adjusted self.

I had seen what depression did to Robin. It was an ugly, unrelenting beast that would feed and feed and feed until there was nothing left to devour.

I sipped the cold coffee as Owen shuffled in, shutting the bedroom door behind him. He settled on the bed next to me.

“Have a good nap?” I asked as pleasantly as I could manage.

“Yeah. The Pirates lost. Again. What are you doing in here?”

“I’ve just been . . . thinking.” I stopped, wanting to say more, afraid to say more.

Owen’s eyes narrowed with concern. “Thinking about what?”

Now was the time. I had to do it—the list couldn’t be wrong.

“I need to tell you something, but I don’t know how.”