“How we are living is also none of your concern. Neither is Alice.”
He leaned back in his chair and tried very hard to force an easy grin, something he might have known would never work if he were even slightly human. “How did you find the flighty bitch? I looked three months with no real leads.”
“None of your business.”
My father shifted his position in the chair again, this time laying his hands flat on the tabletop in front of him. He was already losing composure, which disappointed, really. His next smile crinkled the line of stitches along his cheek. That one movement made it so that I couldn’t seem to look away. And staring at the stitches brought my memories all back in a flash. My helplessness under his weight, the delight in his eyes as he opened the gash on his own cheek, the warmth of the blood dripping onto my face.
“If you’re not going to tell me about my home, maybe I’ll petition to have Fred come for visitation.” A blatant threat, an ineffectual one at that, but the idea that he’d use Freddie to try to force me to talk, that he’d actually spoken the name of my brother aloud from his disgusting mouth—with those few words, my father had stirred up just enough anger to burn away my memories.
I sighed out the last of my panic and said, “Non-molestation order.” I’d applied for an NMO for me and my brothers from my hospital bed the day after my father’s arrest. It was standard practice in attempted murder cases, according to the child services counselor they’d sent out. She was also how I’d discovered that while I couldn’t become guardian to my brothers, I legally didn’t need a guardian at age sixteen, and I had the legal right to continue occupying my house. I knew my father was aware of every step I’d taken through the legal system as well, so all of this ridiculous fronting was just more boring drivel from the man. And I was done listening.
I rolled my eyes to stare at the door DS Day had passed through just minutes before. “I thought this would be more interesting than it is.” I stood up, and my father slammed his hands on the table.
“Sit.”
I crossed my arms, still standing. I thought perhaps he’d finally lost the last of his restraint, but he managed to compose himself once again.
“I’ve a story to tell you.” He gestured at the chair. “Sit. Please.”
“Pass.”
I turned toward the door and he said, “It’s about your mother.”
I heard the slightest edge of desperation in his voice and pursed my lips to stop a smile before looking at him from over my shoulder. “Do you think there’s anything you can tell me that Alice can’t? She was Mum’s best friend.”
“That bitch will never know what I know about my wife. I can tell you the real reason we got married.”
I turned back to face him, studying his features skeptically. “Still a pass. I don’t think you know all that much about my mother, least of all her reasons for doing anything.”
This time I made it close enough to the door to rest my hand on the handle before he said something that stopped me. “She killed a man.”
He was lying. I knew for sure he was lying, but I couldn’t seem to leave the room, despite how much I was internally yelling at myself to just go. I managed to create a neutral expression before I faced him again, not that it tempered the triumph blaring at me from his every feature.
“That’s something Alice knows nothing about,” he taunted.
“Because she knows better than to believe something so stupidly false.”
His expression then was more than triumphant. It was outright victory. Whether what he was about to say was truth or a lie, he believed it. I, of course, still could have left, but he knew I wouldn’t, and that made me want to slap him as hard as I could. So I resigned myself to listening to more of his arrogance, newly determined to glean something more out of our meeting than pathetic power plays and his blathering on.
But I wasn’t going to make it entirely easy on him.
“Why would that matter at all? She’s dead and gone.”
My father only gestured at the chair across from him. His turn to play games with me, it seemed.
I sat and said, “I’ll listen.”
“We’d met long before that dance, your mom and me.”
He watched me carefully after he spoke, like I was supposed to express some kind of shock at this, his first revelation. When I didn’t, he said, “Thought I’d be meeting a whore that day, not a con.” And he was at it again. Apparently not even Saint Emily Moriarty was safe from his skewed implications. “That’s how domestics usually go. We get called to an hourly motel to deal with screams from a lady and sounds of a fight, and it’s a pimp rolling his tart, nine out of ten.