Page 27 of The Secrets We Left Behind
She moved toward the kitchen as he reached ground level, and she could see how agitated he was starting to become as he scanned the room.
“Where is he?” Harry asked, spinning around. “Where’s Peter?”
Addy lifted her head as her heart started to pound, her face burning hot as she met his stare. “I couldn’t stop him,” she finally said, trying not to stammer. “You said it yourself, it’s not so easy to restrain a grown man.”
“What the hell do you mean, you couldn’t stop him?” Harry bellowed. “Where is Peter?”
The door opened and shut with a bang and Elise came storming in, a paper bag in one hand, her face like thunder.
“Quiet!” she hissed. “You don’t raise your voice like that in this house, not if you don’t want to be found.”
Addy cowered as Harry stalked closer to her, his face inches from hers.
“What have you done?” he asked. “Where is Peter?”
“Get away from her!” Elise smacked the barrel of her rifle into Harry’s shoulder, her paper bag of food discarded on the floor. “Back up,” she ordered. “Now.”
Harry skulked backward, and Elise slowly lowered the gun as he held up his hands.
“What’s actually going on here?” Elise asked. “I leave for a few hours and I come home to an argument?”
“Ask your sister,” Harry muttered.
“Adelaide?”
Adelaide gulped as tears started to spill down her cheeks. It had seemed so right at the time, what she’d done, what she’d chosen to do when she’d seen Peter in so much agony.
“Where’s Peter?” Elise asked, her eyes widening as she stared at her and then around the room. “Where the hell is he, Addy? What’s happened while I’ve been gone?”
“He was so insistent,” she whispered, her back pressed against the wall now, her fingers frantically clawing the wallpaper. “I couldn’t let him suffer like that, Elise, I just couldn’t do it.”
Elise set down her rifle and slowly sank into the sofa, head in her hands. “Tell me where he is so I can go get him,” she said with a sigh. “Honestly, Adelaide, could you not make things easy for me, just this once?”
“You can’t go and get him.” Adelaide wiped at her cheeks, summoning her courage. “I fell asleep,” she confessed. “I was sitting with him and watching him for so long, and the next thing I knew I woke up and he was gone.”
“And then what happened?” Harry asked, his voice strained,pained, from across the room.
“I saw the front door was open, and I ran outside looking for him,” Addy said. “He’d dragged himself all the way down the steps, and I followed the marks in the grass. I could see where he’d been. And then I found him crying, all alone, just lying there.”
Harry seemed shocked at this, but her sister looked more disbelieving than anything.
“What happened then, Addy?” Elise asked.
She swallowed. “At the time it seemed like the right thing to do. He was so adamant that I help him, so I found a wheelbarrow and ...”
“Oh Addy, what have you done?” Elise groaned.
“He begged me to take him, and I did,” she admitted. “He knew what he wanted, Elise, and I wanted to keep him safe, I did, but all he wanted was to surrender so he could go home.”
“Go home?” Harry thundered. “If by go home you mean receive a bullet through his head? You sent a lamb to slaughter, Adelaide. That’s what you’ve done.”
Elise didn’t even seem to hear Harry, because her eyes never left Adelaide’s. “You pushed awheelbarrowcontaining a British soldier into a German camp?”
Adelaide looked at Harry and then back to her sister as the reality of what she’d done came crashing down around her. “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” she whispered.
“Agoodidea?” Elise choked. “A good idea to hand a man over to the Nazis, not to mention put yourself in that kind of danger?”
“Elise, I’m sorry—”
