He’s not meant to look like some model. I know about wolves in sheep’s clothing, about role models who end up being arseholes and little girls who go looking for daddy figures after divorces, but no, no. I bring a fingertip to the screen and brush the pixelated shape of his face; it doesn’t falter. Still looks tragic and sad beneath his vague smile.
Footsteps echo up behind me. Mum stops abruptly and clears her throat.
“Leo? What are you doing, chick?”
I don’t want to live under a heap of ugly truths in pretty packages. How the hell is anyone supposed to navigate that kind of world?
“Leo.” Her voice falters. She’s noticed the screen, I’m sure, and she can see the way I’m trembling in her posh new dining chair.
My words crack on the way out. I’m spitting splinters. “You wouldn’t lie to the police, would you, Mum?”
A pause. “Of course not. What are you talking about?”
“Other people on the street…they think maybe he wasn’t here.”
“Who’s he?”
“Stop it.”
Mum inhales sharply. “You know what? I don’t like your tone.”
“If you lied, that means I lied. It means I can never tell the truth.” I put my face in my hands; I don’t want to look at her watery reflection in the screen, or the way the outline of her face blends into his. “Please tell me I don’t have to lie.”
“Can’t…can’t the inheritance just be the truth?” she croaks.
Enough, enough.
It’s been months since I last cried, but now tears feel like macabre orgasms, all hot and inevitable. And here they come, burning and stinging the corners of my eyes, making the world look like the pixelated screen I’m so desperately trying to avoid. I’m such a child; I can’t bear for her to see me like this.
“What happens if we tell the truth?” I sob. “Can’t we just give the money back?”
“And what do you think will happen? You think he’s a nice man who’ll just leave us alone?” she explodes. “Leo, for God’s sake, do you have any idea what we’re dealing with?”
Her volume makes me flinch. She never shouts. “But we don’t know that he did it. Even if he wasn’t here, he could have been somewhere else, somewhere harder to prove—”
“Right. Okay. Yes, he didn’t do it, and they asked me to lie under oath just in case. He paid us ten million dollars of just in case.”
Her words sink in like needles, prickling along the back of my neck.
“You let him buy us,” I whimper into my hands.
“Do you think I had a choice? When his people came to me, what they proposed—you think they’d have just let me walk away without cooperating?”
“I don’t know, Mum. I don’t know.”
“Come on, chick. How hard is it to just not say anything? It’s not like anyone will ask—”
“But they are asking! At the country club, Dean says…”
“So we won’t go. We won’t go.” She begins to pace. “This will all be forgotten in a couple months. They freed him. Life goes on. I don’t want to see you upset over this.”
“You let him buy us,” I say again, almost crooning to myself.
Our silence, our words…both, owned.
It’s like being vacuum-packed in sin.
A rough, raw sob emerges from somewhere behind me. It doesn’t sound like my mother, but then she’s not the person I thought she was. Parents are supposed to take care of you. They’re meant to keep the skeletons in the closet and the monsters under the bed.
“We can do a lot with that money,” Mum says between her own tears. “Think about it. Any college, anywhere in the world that you want, and we’ll never have to ask your father for anything…”
“You make it sound like freedom, but it’s not.”
Her footsteps grow softer, then fade. Her sniffles grow quieter.
It’s just me and a screen and a war of hot tears, and Aeron Lore, staring back at me with a relieved little smile. And wouldn’t you be relieved if you could get away with murder?
I bet he doesn’t know what he’s broken.
I bet he doesn’t care.
But I know, I know.
I know.
CHAPTER TWO
Leo
Panic (noun): unpleasant chemical reaction triggered by falling off the top of the food chain.