I could hear Michael shifting on his feet behind me and I knew that he was biting at the bit to ask what the hell I was doing. But I needed him to stay quiet for just a few minutes longer.

Naomi looked at me cautiously as if she still couldn’t believe that it was going to be this easy to get me to go along with her. I needed to say something else to convince her to buy into this completely.

“Hey, I know,” I said with a smile. “How about we have a movie night? That’s something that we haven’t done since I was a kid.”

I tried to make my face look as realistically excited as I could possibly muster.

“Okay,” she said as the corners of her lips started to turn upward and form a smile. “But none of those romantic chick-flicks. You know how much I hate that shit.”

She pointed over toward Michael.

“He can come, but if the two of you start making out or anything during the movie then I’m going to cut your tongues out.”

I inadvertently gave her a shocked and horrified look before I was able to catch myself.

“Relax,” she laughed. “I was just kidding. Well, I still don’t want you to make out during the movie, but I was kidding about cutting your tongues out. Michael is safe from me, for as long as you still continue to like him.”

“Okay,” I said with a smile so fake that it hurt my teeth. “Are you going to let us out now?”

Naomi seemed to bristle at my question.

“I mean, unless you’re going to somehow find a way for us all to watch a movie inside the greenhouse.”

I chuckled to make it seem extra nonchalant.

Naomi looked between me and Michael, and then must have decided that she believed the act that I was putting on, because she reached out and opened the lock on the glass door.

As soon as he heard the lock slide free from the mechanism that held it, Michael knew exactly what it was that I had asked him to be ready for. He rushed past me and out the door, tackling Naomi before she even had time to react to him. Naomi screamed in shock and I heard the cracking sound of her head hitting the floor of the roof. That had to have hurt. She wrestled with Michael against the ground, but he had a firm grip on her, at least he did have a firm grip on her for the first moment or so of their scuffle. Naomi somehow managed to slip out of his arms and got to her feet as Michael reached out to grab her again. She ran to the edge of the roof and Michael got up to run toward her again too.

“No!” I shouted to him as I held my arm out in front of me.

He looked back and me and paused as he waited for me to tell him why I had stopped him from getting hold of my aunt again.

“Stay where you are,” I said to him. “Please.”

There was something about the way that Naomi perched next to the edge of the roof that caused me alarm. There was a section of roof that had no border to it, just an open drop to the ground, and it was the exact section that she was standing in front of. She was carefully balanced with one foot on the rooftop and one on the thin strip of edging that stood between her and the plummet to the city streets below. I held both hands out in front of me as if somehow my fingers could root both her and Michael in their places and avoid anything else horrible from happening.

“You tricked me,” Naomi said with a sour face that looked as if she might actually cry. “You betrayed me.”

“Naomi please,” I said as I tried to inch forward toward her slowly.

“I was trying to help you and you tricked me,” she said. “You aren’t at all like your mother; I take it back. Paula would never have tricked me. Your mother would never have played with someone’s trust like that. You aren’t anything like her. You’re actually much more like me.”

I watched in slow motion as Naomi looked at me through tear-stricken eyes and took a step over the edge of the roof. It felt like everything happened at once then. Michael leapt forward to try to grab her and save her from falling to her death. I ran toward her, knowing that there was no way I could reach her in time, but feeling as if I had to move and not just stand there helplessly as I watched my mother’s sister jump to her death.

But there was nothing to do but watch it happen.

Michael walked over to the edge of the roof and looked down. Then he turned back around to me as I walked closer to him and he grabbed me in his arms as I buried my head against his shirt.

“I killed her,” I cried softly against him. “I killed her.”

“You didn’t kill her,” he said as he rested his head against mine. “She killed herself.”

“She killed herself because she felt that I had betrayed her. It’s my fault.”

“Lisette,” Michael said as he pulled back a bit to lift my head up so I could look at him. “None of this is your fault.”

“You’d say that even if you didn’t believe it. You’re just trying to make me feel better,” I said.

“No, I’m not. I will always be brutally honest with you, even when it hurts.”

“Prove it,” I said.

“What?”

“Tell me something brutally honest that you know I don’t want to hear—anything.”

“I don’t see how that will help this situation,” he said.

“I need to know that you’ll be honest with me, even if it sucks,” I said.

I waited to hear what he would say.

“Fine,” he said. “You might hate me for this, but it will at least prove the point that you’re seeking reassurance on. That night—the one on the rooftop here when I held you over this edge; for a split second, I thought about letting you fall.”

“What?” I whispered in shock. “You were going to kill me?”

“Of course not,” he said. “The thought only crossed my mind for a split second. But yes, in that split second, the thought of letting you fall did cross my mind.”

“Why?” I asked in quiet disbelief.

“Because not being able to have you was killing me. It was the worst imaginable torture that I could think of or had ever been through, and I wanted to do something to make it stop.”

I stared at Michael and saw his jaw quiver and his pupils shake. He was telling me the truth; the cold, hard, painful truth about something that I didn’t want to hear.

“How’s that for painful truth?” he asked.

“I believe you now,” I said. “Thank you.”

“Are you upset about what I just said?” he asked with a worried expression.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I would have rather fallen to my death off this roof than to have been without you too.”