But this was worse, so much worse. She’d lied to me. A lie of omission, but still a lie.

“Then what?” I turned to fully face her. She finally looked up, meeting my eyes.

“He told me that he and his girlfriend had been fighting. And we talked about, I don’t even know, and I—” She stared at her hands on her lap. “Then he kissed me,” she said.

Her words sent me reeling. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I couldn’t believe she’d hidden something like this from me. The betrayal stung. We were best friends, we were family. She clasped my wrists, holding on to me tightly. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you earlier, okay? I’m sorry.”

Maybe it wasn’t fair, but all I could think was that Elise was mine, the only thing that was mine in a world where Christian almost always got everything, even if he didn’t want it—didn’t want her. She was the only person in the world who had chosen me. We’d chosen each other. And now it felt like everything we’d been was a lie, even though I knew that wasn’t true.

“When?” I whispered, the only question I could manage.

“A couple weeks ago.” She was still squeezing my wrists, not letting me turn away. “It was stupid. I was stupid. And last night, I saw him and he was with his ex and he wouldn’t even talk to me, wouldn’t even acknowledge me standing in front of him. When I tried to talk to him, he turned and walked away without a single word.”

“Let go,” I told her, looking down at our hands. “You’re hurting me.”

“Sorry,” she said, releasing me immediately.

I pulled into myself, drawing my knees up and hugging them with my arms.

“It was humiliating,” she went on. “You were right—he’s an asshole.”

Even angry, I could sense something off about Elise’s story. All of this over a kiss. Maybe there was something she wasn’t telling me. Maybe it’d been more than a kiss.

“I should’ve listened to you,” she said. “I—”

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the Bride being bound up and dragged to a pine box.

“Say something?” Elise said, eyes pleading.

I didn’t know what to say. I could tell how upset she was, but how could she not have seen that this would affect me too? She’d kissed Christian and intentionally kept it from me even though she knew how I felt about him. Or more important, how I felt about the two of us. I told her everything. And now I was supposed to just forget about this betrayal because it’d all blown up in her face? Now she told me that I was right about Christian all along, that he was an asshole, and I was just supposed to commiserate with her? Fuck that.

I turned to face the screen and watched the Bride get buried alive. “I know she’s supposed to be this hero or something, but she spends most of the movie getting beaten up.”