Riki had known.

Of that I had zero doubt—not after the conversation in the garage. He hadn’t been SAS ten years ago, but as a discus champion, he’d been big and strong. My mother would’ve been no match for him had he decided to strike out.

He’d had a motorcycle back then, too. Not hard to follow my mother’s car from the Cul-de-Sac, flag her down on the loneliness of a road made dark and claustrophobic by the forest, then force her into the passenger seat.

It was a mistake to assume she must’ve been overwhelmed in the Cul-de-Sac. She could’ve survived whatever had made her scream and leave the house, only to be attacked farther on, far from anyone who could help her.

Far from me.

Rain began to hit the windows with a rattling clatter that indicated hail, the tiny beads of ice collecting on the balcony before vanishing as my mother had done that dark night.

* * *

—

I woke with a gritty, groggy feeling that told me I’d been dreaming all night, hovering on the edge of sleep but never quite getting there. To add to that, my foot ached like I’d beaten it with a hammer. Groaning, I just sat in bed for long minutes until I could get myself moving.

Shoving aside the thin blanket I’d pulled on at some point last night, I swung my good leg out of bed. “What the hell?” The bottom of my foot felt stiff, wrong. Frowning, I lifted it to see a dirty sole.

Not the dirty of picking up a few bits of fluff while walking barefoot on wooden floors, or the dirty of running down the drive without shoes. This was the dirty of walking barefoot on soil and grass. A blade of the latter was stuck to the pad below my big toe, the green drying to a kind of brownish olive.

Cheeks cold with a burn, I glanced at my moon boot . . . to see blades of grass and streaks of dirt on the nearest side. When I managed to get myself up and limped off to the bathroom using the cane, the full-length mirror had a nasty surprise for me: the bottom of the boot was filthy. But most heavily on one side.

As if I’d been dragging my leg along the ground instead of using the cane.

That cane, when I lifted it to check the bottom, was clean. Putting it carefully to the side, I grabbed a fresh trash bag off the roll I kept on the counter. Dr. Binchy—no, Dr. Tawera—had made it plain that I was to keep on the boot to shower.

The best way I’d found to do that was to stick the leg, boot and all, into a garbage bag, and tape it off at the top. It wasn’t foolproof, but if I kept the shower short, the boot stayed dry. Today, I spent most of that shower seated on the stool Shanti had quietly placed in there.

If only the media could see me now.

My heart thudded as I scrubbed. Afterward, towel wrapped around my waist, I sat on the closed lid of the toilet and used disinfectant wipes to clean my other foot and the moon boot. It wasn’t exactly easy. In the end, I resorted to dropping the wipes on the floor and rubbing the sole of the moon boot on them.

It took five wipes, because they kept getting rolled up and tangled, but I got the sucker clean. After disposing of the wipes, I went into the bedroom and pulled off the blanket to look at my sheets. A couple of streaks of dirt, but nothing major. A quick moment of thought and I pulled them off.

It left me sweating.

The maid service usually did this. After removing the sheets, I spent a bit of time making sure that the fitted sheet was lined up with the top sheet at the dirty section, then found an old fountain pen that leaked. I emptied the ink over the stains, the blot of black erasing all evidence.

Evidence of what, I didn’t know.

All I knew was that the service would have no reason to wonder how I’d managed to spill ink onto my sheets. I’d done it before, when I was fresh out of the hospital and working in bed. They’d bleach the sheets and it’d be fine.

Putting new sheets on properly was beyond my limited physical capabilities, but I managed to throw on a top sheet before I chucked the dirty sheets in the laundry basket. I also made sure to text the owner of the maid service:

 Sorry, Mary. Got ink on the sheets again. Left them in the laundry basket.

The reply came as I was dressing, my mouth dry despite the water I’d drunk in the interim:

 More money for me.

Usually, I would’ve grinned at the sharp reply. I liked grumpy old Mary. I wasn’t so sure about Shanti’s feelings when it came to the other woman—I was fairly certain Mary intimidated my father’s wife, but Shanti didn’t allow that to stop her from ensuring Mary and her crew did their jobs to the highest specifications.

“I used to be a maid as a young girl,” Shanti had whispered to me once, the confession a dirty little secret among the rich set. “In the house of a rich sahib who used to drive a shiny white car. I know how a house should be cleaned.”

“How old were you?”

“Fourteen when I started. My father said I’d had enough schooling.” No sorrow or anger in those words, just acceptance. “I wanted to work anyway.”

It was only then that I’d realized the lengths to which my father had gone in order to get a wife who was never going to challenge him. My mother’d had a full high-school education—and she’d hungered for more. In all the media coverage thus far, no one had mentioned how she’d managed to complete a finance degree in the years after moving to New Zealand.

I wondered if my father had indulged her at first because it reflected well on him to have a sophisticated and beautiful wife who could also charm his associates with her mind. By the time he realized he didn’t want an educated wife aware of her own agency, it was far too late. There was no putting the genie back in the bottle.

Now he had a wife who wore demure saris to corporate events and stood in shy silence. My mother had worn the occasional sari—but hers had been glittering creations draped to magnify the dip of her waist and the flare of her hips. She’d looked like an old-world movie siren.