“Gus,” Lilia spoke quietly, her eyes on Augustus.
“That isn’t me,” he replied, his eyes never leaving the screen.
“Turn it off,” Delilah hissed at Sebastian, her voice panicked.
“I’m trying. I can’t find the remote.”
“It’s probably in the console cabinet,” Eleanor suggested, her voice shaking.
Lilia didn’t wait for them to figure it out. She marched over to the wall and ripped the plug out of the socket, plunging the room into utter silence.
“Gus?” Eleanor placed a hand on his shoulder, her voice gentle but filled with concern.
Before he could respond, a gust of wind blew through the house, slamming the front door against the wall. They all jumped, the tension snapping like a rubber band stretched too far.
“We need to go,” Augustus said, his voice firm as he moved to the DVD player. He ejected the disc and slipped it into his pocket. “Come on.”
They didn’t need to be told twice. As they hurried out of the house, the oppressive atmosphere clung to them like a shadow. Whatever secrets Willow had been hiding, they were pulling them deeper into a web they were increasingly unsure they could escape.
As Augustus drove through the quiet streets, the tension between him and Lilia was palpable, a heavy silence neither seemed willing to break. He had dropped their friends off at their homes. The events of the evening lingered in the air like a storm cloud, threatening to unleash at any given moment. The headlights cut through the darkness, casting fleeting shadows on the empty sidewalks. Lilia stared out the window, her mind racing, trying to piece together everything that they had uncovered. But no matter how hard she tried to focus on the mystery, her thoughts kept drifting back to Gus.
“Gus,” she said when she couldn’t take the silence any longer. “Please say something.”
Augustus kept his eyes on the road, his jaw clenched. “She was cheating on me,” he murmured after a long pause, his tone resigned. “I can’t say that I’m surprised. I had a feeling she was.”
“Why didn’t you say anything to us?”
He shrugged, a bitter smile tugging at the corner of his lips. “What good would it do? Willow was going to do whatever she wanted. That’s who she was.”
“You should’ve told me,” she insisted, her voice softening.
“What would have changed?” Gus glanced at her, his eyes dark and unreadable. “It wouldn’t have made what we did any less shitty if you had known.”
Lilia’s breath caught in her throat.
So, they were talking about that.
“We’re not talking about that,” she said quickly, her voice firmer than she felt.
“Shouldn’t we?” Augustus shot back, his frustration bubbling to the surface. “It doesn’t matter how much we avoid the conversation—it happened.”
“It was a mistake. We were drunk.”
“Lying has never been your strong suit, Chen.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she repeated, her voice wavering. “We’re not talking about that. We’re talking about you. Your girlfriend cheated on you, and you had no idea.”
Augustus sighed, pulling the car over to the side of the road. He turned the engine off and frowned. “I knew,” he admitted. “I just didn’t want to see it.”
“You didn’t deserve that.”
He looked down at her hand and then back up at her, a conflicted look on his face. “Maybe I did. Maybe we all get what we deserve.”
“Gus . . . ”
He shook his head. “No, it’s true. We all have secrets, Lilia. Things we’ve done, things we’ve kept hidden. And now it’s all catching up with us.”
“We’ll figure this out,” she said. “We have to.”
