My thumb stings. When I look down, I realize I’ve been pressing a small screw right into the pad of it, and the skin is pitted. A white bruise of pressure ringed with starved purple blood.
“So then we’re sitting there, all like, who talked to the police? Because it wasn’t anyone from the club. And we know it wasn’t the Andersons because they’re hardly ever there.”
“We’ve been away too.”
We’ve been away for two weeks. Aeron Lore was arrested nearly two months ago.
Acid curdles at my pulse points. I want to be sick.
“Hey. I know it’s not you.” Dean gives a short bleat of a laugh. “You’re too busy taking apart your computers and shit to pay attention to which cars are pulling into someone else’s drive.”
It’s a video camera. A 2002 Sony, to be precise—it looks as much like a computer as it does a giraffe. I must be glaring at him because he holds up his hands.
“Not like you don’t do other stuff too,” he adds quickly. “Or, you know, I guess you do.”
“They’d need more than a car,” I bite out. “Anyone could be driving a car. Someone must have actually seen him.”
“I guess so, yeah.” He sighs. “But it’s shady. Am I right?”
“You’re saying somebody lied.”
I should not have said that. Some things, you think them, but you must not say them out loud.
Dean presses his lips together. “I’m not saying that. But my dad…yeah. Totally…uh, that’s what he thinks.”
“He can’t possibly remember every car that comes and goes around here.”
“No. Well. That’s why he’s got no case, huh?”
“I’m going to head in.” I scrape up my tools and the camera parts, dumping them in the raffia basket beside the sun lounger. “It’s cold.” My brain is full of dates and times and calculations. Possibilities. Every conclusions stings like a bitch.
“Leo?”
I look up to find Dean frowning, his brow all contorted with…sympathy. It might even be real.
“You okay?” he asks.
“Fine,” I mutter, hauling myself up while avoiding his Nice Boy face. “See you at school.”
Before he can say another word, I fly through the glass doors and pad barefoot through the kitchen, my pulse jumping with every step. I pass the Chanel tote, casually draped over the edge of the kitchen island as if it were bought with money earned the normal way, and my stomach lurches until I can taste the burrito I had for lunch.
My laptop is where I left it, in the dining room atop the brand new mahogany suite. Polished wood, all the smoother for the tears to slide off—I want to cry them, but they won’t come. Instead my belly throbs as I load up the browser to check dates. Because I have to be sure.
Wouldn’t you, if everything you depended on was about to slip away?
Six and a half weeks since Aeron Lore was arrested.
Four weeks and four days since that obnoxious, beautiful tote bag materialized on the end of my bed one morning. Mum just smiled when I asked her about it. Said I deserved it after going through the move. She looked so guilty—about the divorce, the divorce, I need it to be about that—that I didn’t question any further.
Four weeks exactly since she booked Hawaii. She was holding a book as she explained the inheritance; she kept losing her page. Maybe she was already wearing sandpaper. I don’t know.
God.
I don’t want to know.
The news website flickers on my laptop screen. I picked GNS, a channel Aeron Lore doesn’t own, since I figured they’d be more impartial. They use all the unofficial pictures—the kind paparazzi hound people for, waiting around street corners and Dumpsters and trees—and my eyes are practically blurring, I’m staring so hard. Can you tell from a photo if a man is a murderer? What does a real murderer even look like?