Dane

She swallowed hard and her voice got shaky. "What you're doing, the way you've been living, it's spiritual suicide. The gains aren't there. You're killing yourself for things that aren't as valuable as you. Can't you see that? See that you're worth more than that?"

​​

"No. I'm not."

Her fingers curled in, fisted his shirt and her voice got harder. "Yes, you are."

He searched her gaze and she stared at him, steely-eyed, demanding that he see what she was saying. "Lila…" he breathed, "Where is this coming from? Why do you look angry at me for giving up for you?"

"Because, you were hurting yourself. You were hurting the man I love—and you didn't even give me a choice. You didn't ask me whether I wanted you to do that. I didn't, Dane! I didn't want you to give that up for me. For us. Or for anyone else! I want you whole, and happy and… okay. And instead, you're here and you're… broken. And that breaks me. Don't you get it?"

"No, I don't. You're the only thing in this world that makes sense me to me, Lila. Saving you, giving anything to save you… that's love."

"Not if it steals the person I love most from me."

*****

Lila

He was so utterly confused, so heartbroken, she wanted to just pull him into her arms and whisper comfort to him and kiss him better, love him better. But she knew she couldn't. He had to understand this. They could never get past this if they didn't face it, and she'd had enough time to think lately…

It had to be this way.

So she pulled her hand away from him, ignoring the look of pain that darted across his face when he lost her touch, and she cleared her throat.

"I need to tell you my story, Dane. I have to tell you—I have to show you, because I learned this the hard way. It almost killed me. And if you can't see it, it'll kill you too."

He took a deep breath and raked that hand through his hair in a move that always made her stomach trill. But she didn't let it show on her face. If he started kissing her, she wasn't going to be strong enough to stop. So she folded her arms across her chest like a shield.

"Okay," he said quietly, nodding. "Tell me."

So, she did. Standing there in the dining room of the hidden apartment, she decided to put it all at his feet, and pray he'd know what to do with it.

"So… you know, my father was the Governor of Pennsylvania when I was young," she started. She'd gripped her hands to fists, she realized. Her knuckles were white. She relaxed them and tried to let her shoulders loosen.

This wasn't a place she went often, and the memories weren't pleasant. But Dane deserved to know that she understood more than he thought. And maybe she deserved to be heard, too. Because she he was still really confused about what she was trying to show him.

This was going to be too hard if she had to face him the whole time, so she cleared her throat and indicated that they should go to the couch. They both circled it and sat down, side by side. He looked at her once and then carefully, slowly, took her hand.

She let him, but kept hers loose in his grip.

"When I was really young, we were poor. Like, for real poor. The kind where sometimes you don't have dinner—and you basically never have breakfast. And my dad… he carried this, right? He thought it was his fault. He'd lost his job and things got bad and… anyway, he decided that politics were the way forward. That he could change things for us, and for other families in poverty, by getting elected to office and changing the laws." She sucked in a breath. "Then things started to change when I was about ten. He'd been elected a Senator, I think, and his first term was a huge success. The thing I remember about that time was that it seemed like everything changed overnight. Like, Dad was working his ass off, and Mom was hopeful but scared. Then… suddenly he was on television, and driving a nice car and we moved… and that was before he got elected." She swallowed and Dane squeezed her hand. "but I was a kid and it was nice to suddenly have nice clothes, and the latest toys, and friends… I didn't want to question it. So I just enjoyed it.

"He kept telling me back then that I needed to remember that it wasn't what I kenw, it was who I kenw that would get me a head. He used to say that all the time—know powerful people and you'll be a powerful person, Delilah! And he used to have these sessions with me—I was like, twelve!—where he'd role play conversations with me, and teach me how to talk to people, how to get them to do what I wanted them to do. I thought it was quality time with my dad—and it seemed to help me at school and with friends and stuff, so I never thought about it. But he was teaching me how to manipulate people. Like, really manipulate them."

She hesitated, but this wasn't going to get easier, she knew. "How much do you know about the scandal that he started?" she asked quietly.

Dane shrugged. "I know that it was something to do with money and laws that he changed without making sure people knew all the implications."

She nodded. "I don't really know all the ins and outs. It happened when I was a kid, and by the time I was old enough to understand, I didn't really want to anymore. But what I do know is that whatever law he got passed was… deceptive. Something to do with other laws or regulations that touched on the same stuff, but no one realized how they'd work together. I don't know, except that I heard some analyst say once that they estimated eight percent of the state employees, union workers, and industrial businesses were affected. And that the money they lost was 'found' by my father and some of his allies."

"Was it true?"

"Maybe? I don't really know. I know we got rich. I know we had enough that, when the shit hit the fan, neither of my parents was working for like four years, yet we were fine.

"Anyway, the short story is that when people first realized all their security and pension money was gone, it hit the media first. They started chasing us. There were dozens of them outside our house every day, and stories every night on the news. My parents kept me home from school, and some of my friends… weren't my friends anymore because their parents were affected.

"Then the protestors started showing up. And even though that sucked, they were okay. They yelled a lot and made trouble whenever we were driving through. But they were… legal in what they did." She swallowed hard. "But then the crazies that you asked me about that time started showing up." Dane's grip on her hand tightened and he put his other hand over it. She nodded. "The day after someone ran a car into our fence, my dad had a crew in there, building a ten foot security fence and adding a security system that was… completely over the top.

"It took about a year for things to slow down. There were still scary things at times, but after twelve months it was mostly fine. We lived in this big house at the end of this long drive, with trees everywhere. I changed to a private high school and my new school was good. I started going by Lila instead of Delilah, and no one really thought about it. There were still stories sometimes about legal cases, but people's eyes weren't on us anymore. At first.

"But then I noticed Dad started acting weird. Getting really irritated about little things, and he would freak out if something got moved and he couldn't find it, or if he heard a noise he didn't understand. I didn't get it, I didn't make the connection until the morning we went out to the car, because Dad was going to drive me to school, and there was a… a threat scratched into the side of it."

She swallowed and took a deep breath. "Dad was so angry, I worried he was going to have a heart attack. He started screaming at the trees, telling whoever it was to come get him, that he wasn't scared. And stuff like that. It freaked me out. He drove too fast to school and when I got home that evening, the car was in the shop and he was driving a loaner.

"A few weeks later someone threw a brick through the window. And I didn't realize it at the time, but that was the moment everything started to change."