“Council officer came, gave them a fine, and they didn’t give a toss. I have a mind to report them to the Law Society.”

“Not sure allowing your dog to do his business where he likes will be of interest to the Law Society.”

My father gave me a strange smile. “You’d be surprised. The Fitzpatricks aren’t holding pot parties every weekend anymore, are they?”

I’d forgotten that. Unlike with Mellie’s amusing shenanigans today, “old” people zoning out on pot hadn’t been of much interest to my teen self. But my father was right—the weekly debaucheries had come to an abrupt halt some months before my mother’s disappearance.

Her disappearance was the defining point in my life. I remembered the time before and after with crystal clarity. But I didn’t recall the exact date the parties had stopped because I’d never paid that much attention to them in the first place.

But it reminded me of something else. “Didn’t their old dog . . .” I left the sentence unfinished, even though Pari appeared distracted by the task she’d set herself of carefully cutting the skin off her piece of chicken.

My father nodded, confirming he remembered the dog had been found run over on the street. “It was half senile by then anyway.”

We didn’t speak further until Shanti had hustled Pari from the table.

My father leaned back in his chair, an after-dinner tumbler of cognac in hand. “Police tell you anything else? I had a missed call from the woman cop, but didn’t get a chance to reply.”

I shared the confirmation about my mother not being the driver, watching him with laser focus the entire time.

His fingers tightened around the tumbler. “No one could’ve known she took that money. Even I didn’t know until twelve hours after she walked out. And I searched the house top to bottom. Only place it could’ve been was in the car.”

I had hazy memories of him swearing as he’d torn the house apart. With my leg still hurting from that injury, I hadn’t helped—but I hadn’t minded when he’d come into my room and turned it inside out. Desperate for proof that my mother hadn’t left me, I’d wanted him to find the money. “You tracked down her safety-deposit box, too.”

“At least I got back a few diamonds. She had nowhere else she could’ve stashed the money.”

“She trusted Diana.”

“I thought of that—but Diana would’ve come forward when I laid the theft charge. No way she’d have allowed Nina to be smeared.”

He was right; Diana just wasn’t the kind to allow something like that to go unchallenged. And if my mother had given her the money for safekeeping, then hadn’t contacted her as agreed, she’d definitely have kicked up a stink.

“Who do you think would have had reason to take the money? Hypothetically speaking.”

“Your mother was a slut.” Bullets shaped like words. “You knew it, too. No point pussyfooting around it.”

I said nothing, just waited to see where my father intended to go with this.

“She probably hooked up with the wrong person and he killed her for the money she stole.” A shrug. “Don’t ask me, boy.”

Boy.

A signal that I was to end the conversation and go back to my place in the world. Far beneath my father. I thought about confronting him again about the scream I’d heard that night, but knew better than to do so without something to use as leverage.

Ishaan Rai hadn’t become such a successful businessman by crumpling in the face of challenge. He’d lie without hesitation, tell me I’d imagined it—because what proof did I have aside from a decade-old memory?

Fractured, confused memory.

“Good night, Dad,” I said, and if there was an edge of mockery in the address, he was too focused on his cognac to care.

When I ran into Shanti on the stairs, I said, “Avoid him tonight.”

Her face blanched. “He’ll be angry.”

“He’s on the way to getting drunk again—he won’t remember.” She’d still bear the brunt of the emotional fallout tomorrow, but she was used to that type of thing and seemed to consider it my father’s right as her husband.

Poor Shanti. No one had told her that her fairy-tale wedding to a rich man from abroad was one of the original dark tales and not the sanitized cutesy version.

I watched from the stairs as she reached the bottom landing. Though she hesitated outside the door that led to the dining area, she turned in the other direction . . . just as glass shattered against one of the dining room walls.

It was as if my father couldn’t stop himself from re-creating his final night with my mother.

I continued on to my room, then locked the door behind me before entering the closet once again. The right yearbook was midway down the shelf that held the detritus of my high-school life.

Carrying it as well as my old notebook out to my desk, I sat and ate a handful of sweets from my sugar drawer. Yeah, I wasn’t about to confess this little habit to Dr. Jitrnicka when he was still only “cautiously optimistic” that my booze addiction was in the past. But unlike with the alcohol, I could only take a certain amount of sugar before it became nauseating—I’d had no limit when it came to alcohol.

Drawer now shut, I flipped through to the section on notable sporting events.

There it was: Riki’s grim face, his hand clenched around his medal as he lifted it high.

22

The caption gave more information than I’d remembered: Ariki Henare after his gold medal discus performance at the New Zealand Secondary Schools Athletics Association championship. Ariki dedicated his victory to his mother, who is currently fighting cancer: “I hope this makes her proud.”

I ran my finger over the words, then rechecked the dates against the entry in my notebook. The timeline matched. Hemi had been sleeping with my mother while his wife was battling cancer.