That spurs on another hug and a fresh round of tears, happy ones this time.

We take the elevator back to my office—where her phone is tucked away in my messenger bag. I feel lighter than I have the past few days, thanks to Emme’s buoyant mood, but the question remains, if Emme and her friends didn’t put the booze in her backpack, who did? And why?

The return of Emme’s phone puts a massive smile on her face. She spends the next two hours thumb typing, and while I want to ask if she’s talking to Kailyn, I manage to resist.

At two in the afternoon Trish, the custody lawyer, shows up and backhands my good mood in the face.

I glance at my calendar, checking to see if I somehow missed a scheduled appointment.

“Sorry to stop by unannounced, but I received some documentation this morning that I needed to share with you as soon as possible, and I was in the neighborhood.” She gives me a strained smile, her eyes darting to the couch where my sister is stretched out, with her laptop. “Hi, Emme.”

Emme lifts her hand in a wave. “Hi.”

“Is there somewhere we can go to discuss this privately?” Trish asks.

“Em, you want to run down to the café and grab a snack or something?” There’s a tightness in the pit of my stomach that I don’t like.

“Sure. I can do that.” Emme’s gaze shifts from Trish to me and back again as she closes her laptop and crosses the room, taking the twenty I hold out to her. “You want anything?”

“I’m good. Grab yourself whatever you want.”

As soon as the door closes behind her, Trish takes a seat opposite me. “I’m very sorry to drop in on you like this, but it looks like your aunt has been busy.” She pulls a file from her bag and sets it on the table between us. “There are some pictures of you that look less than flattering in here.”

“What kind of pictures?” Since college I’ve been incredibly careful about my public persona, aware that people are always watching and often taking photographs when I least expect it.

“You at a bar with some colleagues and a woman doing shots. There are time stamps that indicate it was after work hours.” Trish opens the folder and spreads out a series of images.

There are half a dozen pictures of the crazy fangirl who tried to get me to do a shot with her when I’d been at that bar with Felix, the night Kailyn had taken Emme to get a manicure before the dance. I’d had one beer and I didn’t touch the shot. “Those pictures have been taken out of context.”

Trish taps the desk, her smile patient. “I understand that you want to have a life—”

“I went out for one beer with my colleagues.”

“Which is reasonable. Unfortunately, with this most recent issue at the school and the underage drinking—”

“Emme wasn’t drinking.”

Trish gives me a sympathetic smile. “She was in possession of alcohol, though.”

I scrub a hand over my face. “I know possession is a problem, but I’m still working on getting to the bottom of that. Emme says it wasn’t hers, so I’m hoping there’s a way to prove that.”

“It’s commendable that you want to have faith in what Emme tells you—”

I cut her off. “If she said it wasn’t hers, I believe her.”

“Well, then you need undeniable proof.” She clears her throat. “The pictures aren’t the only thing your aunt has up her sleeve, though.”

Fuck. This just keeps getting worse. “What else could she have?”

“Did you know Emme kept a journal?”

She wanders around with a decorated notebook half the time. “Sure. That’s kind of a typical girl thing, isn’t it?”

“It can be. It appears that Emme shared some of her entries with your aunt.”

“She shared them with Linda?” That seems odd. Poetry I can kind of understand, but journals are usually personal, or at least that’s what I assume.

Trish gives me a pained look as she slides a stack of photocopies toward me. “These might be difficult to see, but please remember that these are Emme’s private thoughts, and although she shared them with your aunt, I doubt she intended for you to see them.”

“They’re that bad?” I laugh a little, but sober quickly at her piteous expression.

With each entry I read, written in Emme’s distinctive cursive, my heart shrivels and cracks. Phrases jump out on the page, ones in angry slashing caps, gone over again and again with ink until the paper threatened to tear under the pressure. The running ink and splotches on the page indicate she often cried while she wrote these. Each entry bears a date at the top right corner of the page.

One is dated around the time I started moving my stuff in and cleaning out our parents’ room:

I HATE THIS. I hate that Dax is throwing out all this stuff and there’s nothing I can do about it. He just comes in and takes over and changes everything. I wish he hadn’t moved in here. I wish I could just take care of myself.

Another is from the time Emme punched out that Billy kid and I confiscated her phone:

DAX IS SO MEAN. I hate him so FUCKING much. FUCK FUCK FUCK!!!!! He took my phone for the whole weekend. Now I have no one to talk to. And he’s such a hypocrite! One second he’s saying he gets why I punched Billy and the next he’s grounding me. He’s such an ASSHOLE!

There are endless entries, all of them expressing Emme’s frustration with living with me, my invading her privacy, trying to be her dad when I’m not. It’s hard to read and even harder to understand why she would show any of this to Linda.

I swallow down the surge of emotion that threatens to embarrass me. I reach for the cold coffee on my desk, anything that will help ease the sudden dryness in my mouth.

“I know this is difficult, Dax,” Trish says softly.

“I didn’t realize she felt this way,” I croak.

“I very much doubt she does. She’s a grieving girl who’s experienced a huge trauma and she’s working through her emotions,” Trish reasons.

“Even if Emme says she doesn’t mean it, the prosecution is going to say she’s being coerced to change her story.”

“There’s a strong possibility that they’ll use that argument against you.”

“Christ. Am I going to lose her?” I pinch the bridge of my nose and rub my eyes, on the brink of cracking. My sister has written countless entries about how much she can’t stand me. “I don’t even know if she wants me to fight for her anymore.”

“I think you’ll need to talk to her about that, as painful as it is.”

I nod, my vision blurring. Everything I had seems to be slipping through my fingers. “I’ll speak with her.”

“Of course. Would you like to call me later?”

“Sure, yeah. That would be good.”

Trish stands and I do the same, but my legs are unsteady and my palms are damp.

“Thank you for stopping by.” I walk her to the door.

“Of course.”

Emme’s sitting in the waiting room with some blended drink—likely full of caffeine she doesn’t need. “Come on in, kiddo.” My voice breaks, the pain making the words jagged.

“Is everything okay?” She follows me into the office.

I motion to the couch. “I have to show you something and you need to be very honest with me about the truthfulness of it, okay?”

“Okay.” Her sleeve is in her mouth, the edge already wet from her chewing on it. The skin around her fingers is red and torn. Her anxiety is making her unable to manage without some kind of self-soothing.

I push the papers toward her with a heavy swallow. Her brows come down before her eyes flare. “Where’d you get these?” She flips through the pages with shaky fingers.

“Aunt Linda said you shared them with her.”

I watch her horrified expression change to confusion. “What?”

“These are photocopies. This is your writing.”

“I didn’t give them to her.” She shakes her head vigorously. “I would never show this to anyone. This is from my journal. I never let people read it ’cause it’s what I write when I’m upset, or mad, or sad and just feeling bad about stuff. I don’t know how Linda got this, Dax, and I-I don’t mean it.” She skims the painful words in black ink. “I don’t hate you. I just— sometimes I get so mad ’cause nothing makes sense and I don’t know how to handle all the things in my head. The counselor told me writing things down would help.” Tears well and she wipes them away with the heel of her hand.

“It’s like, we used to just have fun together. Before Mom and Dad died, you used to be fun Dax, but now you have to be another kind of Dax, too, and it’s hard. Sometimes you still get to be fun Dax, but other times when you make rules and stuff it reminds me of Dad, and then I miss him and wish he was here and that it could be different. Does that make sense?”

I give her a small smile. “It makes perfect sense, Emme, but you have to understand how much this worries me, that you think these things, sometimes.”

“I don’t really wish I was with Mom and Dad, not like you think that means.” She blows out a long breath. “Sometimes I really miss them and I wish I could be with them. And sometimes I just wish I could see them and make sure they didn’t hurt when it happened.”