Today was one of those days.

Walking over to the pile, I picked up the last page I’d printed. As always, the final line on the page hung unfinished:

 There really wasn’t much he could do about the blood, without

I’d woken at 3 a.m. and spent the next three hours trying to finish that sentence and failing. That’s why I’d been downstairs when the police came. Attempting to find inspiration in a bottle of Coke.

Now, I picked up a pen and scrawled:

 Two cans of bleach and a flamethrower.

I smiled. There, the critics would love that line. They’d call it one of my title character’s signature turns of phrase. My lovable psychopath who mowed his widowed mother’s grass, walked her grumpy old cat, and only poisoned those who deserved it. The antihero with whom the public had fallen in love despite themselves: Kip Shay, multiethnic and deliberately ambiguous. He could be your brother or your killer.

Like me.

Just your friendly neighborhood writer who often faked a charming smile and whose dead mother had just been found, giving him good reason to commit a murder of his own. I had a single relentless goal now: to figure out the truth about that scream the night of her disappearance.

I’d been trying to chase down the answer for ten years, but I’d been working with a handicap: deep down, I’d believed she was alive, and so had never quite been able to push buttons I should’ve pushed, go as far as was necessary.

But the time for hope was over.

This time, I’d push every button, shove people past their limits, make enemies without hesitation.

A gnawing in my gut, my stomach coming back to life. I made it down the stairs, my breathlessness more a case of damaged internal organs still knitting themselves together than an indictment of my fitness. I took a moment to stand and breathe at the bottom. I couldn’t remember much of the accident, but I knew a sharp piece of . . . something . . . had pierced my lung. It had left scar tissue. Or something like that.

A lot of what the various doctors had told me had gone right through my drugged-up brain. I didn’t know why they did that—gave a patient a whole bunch of pharmaceuticals, then briefed them. Not that I’d really cared. The only thing I’d wanted to know was if I could still walk.

“Your spine sustained no damage,” Dr. Tawera had said with a surgeon’s directness. “You’ll have some residual bone pain, and, according to my colleague Dr. Mainwaring, you may develop breathing issues unless you stick to a good exercise routine. But you won’t come out of this any worse than you went in.”

I liked Dr. Mila Tawera. The short and outwardly grandmotherly woman had no bedside manner and didn’t care. When she looked at me, I was pretty sure all she saw was my skeletal structure. That focus made her an excellent surgeon.

Breath caught, I turned and made my way to the kitchen.

The door to the small prayer room set up by my father’s second wife was open, the sweet smell of incense wafting from it. I glanced at her metal statuettes of the gods, at the flowers and offerings, the handwoven mat she’d brought from India, on which she sat when praying, and felt nothing. These same gods had allowed my mother to die cold and alone.

“Oh.” Shanti jumped back from the counter, where she’d been in the process of prepping dinner, her twenty-two-carat yellow-gold earrings catching the light, and the reusable bindi in the center of her forehead a spot of red velvet.

Small and pretty with big round eyes, Ishaan Rai’s thirty-five-year-old wife was as quiet as a mouse most of the time.

“Sorry”—I smiled—“didn’t mean to startle you.” I’d switched to her native tongue with liquid smoothness.

It was the same language my mother had spoken.

She smiled back, shy but happy to have me around. Why shouldn’t she be? Shanti came from a culture where sons were revered, and father-son relationships considered sacrosanct. In her mind, I wielded far more power in this family than her, yet I treated her with kindness. I didn’t even have an ulterior motive for it. Shanti could give me nothing. Neither could she take anything away.

Truth was, I felt sorry for her. Shanti wasn’t my mother, able to hold her own against Ishaan Rai. Shanti was what Ishaan had always wanted—a simple village woman who was overawed to be with him, and who treated him like a god. It helped that she was twenty-five years his junior. That made her only nine years older than me, but I wasn’t an asshole about it.

Shanti wasn’t the problem in this family.

“I’ll get you some food.” She was already rushing around. “I came to ask if you wanted lunch in your room but I saw you were asleep.” She ducked her head, her waist-length braid moving against the green silk of her simple tunic. “I’m sorry—your door was open.”

“No problem.” Taking a seat at the breakfast counter, the stool not so high that I couldn’t rest my booted foot on the ground, I said, “You don’t have to run around after me.” It wasn’t the first time I’d told her that.

“I like to.” Such genuine sweetness in her voice that I wondered how she survived living with my father.

Turning around to face me, she spoke in a rush. “My friend in India, Renu, she married a month after me and she has a grown stepson, too, and he lives at home with her and his father. He’s not like you. He’s mean to her every day.” She bit down on her lower lip after that burst of information.

“I’m sorry for your friend,” I said. “Some kids never get over their parents’ divorce.”

Tight features easing, she nodded and began to put together a sandwich. I knew she’d feed me a gourmet Indian meal if I gave the least hint of wanting one, but she’d picked up on the fact I generally threw together a sandwich for lunch. Of course, she continued to be horrified when I tried to do that myself—to Shanti, food was the job of the woman of the house.