The Becoming of Noah Shaw (The Shaw Confessions Book 1)

WHEN SOMEONE IS HIDING A secret in a house, something changes in the air. Unspoken words, half-finished smiles, eggshell steps—they distort reality, they muffle truth.

The person with the secret is changed by it—she smiles, but the corners of her mouth don’t quite reach the height they used to. The corners of her eyes don’t crinkle as deeply. The look in her eyes when she tells you she loves you—there’s something behind it. You don’t know what it is—what has she done?

Mara is many things, but a cliché isn’t one of them. If she does have a secret—and she does, I know that now, after that night with Stella, see it in everything she does—her secret isn’t a person. It’s a thing. A thing I can’t know, because it would change us.

What Mara doesn’t know is, it already has.

You can’t keep a secret from the person you love and expect it not to change him, too. She doesn’t trust me with something, which makes me distrust her, and that makes our hands miss each other when we pass something over the table. It makes my mouth just miss hers when I lean to kiss her lips and end up with cheek instead.

When you love someone, you’re saying you trust them. You’re handing them your heart and trusting them to protect it. To keep it safe.

Keeping a secret is like throwing that heart into the air and playing catch with it by yourself. But what you’re really playing with is someone else’s love, someone else’s happiness. I’ve always wondered how people do it. I’m the farthest thing from unfailingly honest—in fact, I’m an extraordinary liar—but it’s strange how different things seem when it’s your own heart that’s being tossed casually into the air. It’s a dangerous game.

When I was a child, I read everything I found, anywhere I found it. The only thing that felt beautiful about my life was the way books let me escape it. I felt surrounded by nothing, and the boredom was thick enough to choke on. When you can choose to do anything, how do you choose? Why?

All my life I’ve heard the phrase Do what makes you happy tossed around—not at me, God knows. But generally, as a principle. But when nothing makes you happy, what do you do then?

This is the essential truth about me: Mara makes me happy. The problem of Mara makes me happy. I shouldn’t say it, but it’s true. I shouldn’t think it, but I do. She’s this endlessly complex, chaotic person, but there’s a method to her madness, and I want to know it.

Can you ever really know another person? I thought I could. I thought I knew her, but now . . .

People who think they know me imagine me in control. When they see Mara and me together, when they think of us together, they see me as the lion tamer, and Mara the lioness. One crack of my whip, or a whisper, or a magic word, I’ll tame her like all the rest.

I don’t want to, is the thing.

But now, knowing what I don’t know, I want to cage her. But I want to be in that cage with her, no whip, no magic, and lock the door behind us, lock the world out. And then:

I want her to split me open, to dig her fingers in and pry open my ribs, lick my heart and my blood and my bones. Pick open my bones and suck out the marrow. I want to be devoured by her. And she wants to devour me just as badly. It’s in every look, every movement, every smile.

But her world is different now, and I don’t know how, because I missed it. My father took that from me, from us, and I didn’t feel that missingness most of the time, but I feel it now. Mara works hard not to show it. She and Jamie or Daniel or all three will exchange a look, and I’ll feel a kick of surprise in my chest. They were part of something that I hadn’t been, forged something together that I was left out of. Excluded from. When I ask Mara about it, she skirts around it, says it doesn’t matter.

But she’s a liar too. It does.