Dr. Jitrnicka nodded approvingly inside my head. “Be honest, Aarav. Show your true self.”

Touching her cheek with my fingers, I smiled and it was fucking sad. “Get away from me, Paige. I’ll chew you up and spit you out and you’ll have nothing to show for it but pain and scars.” Leaning in as tears formed in her eyes, I kissed her pale pink lips. “You can’t save me. I’m well beyond that.”

So far beyond that I was capable of murder. The person who’d killed my mother was as good as dead. All I needed was their name.

The intercom buzzed.

Picking up the remote handset on the nearby side table, I said, “Yes?”

“Aarav, I have a Detective Regan and a Constable Neri here for you.”

“Send them up. Thanks, Bobby.” After hanging up, I kissed Paige one last time before I got up with the crutches snugged in my armpits.

Wiping the tears off her face, she rose after me. I watched as she put on her shapeless black coat. Her eyes were red-rimmed when she looked at me. “You’re a far better person than you think, Aarav. No matter what, you can always call me.”

“I know.” I also knew that I never would. I’d save Paige even if I couldn’t save myself.

The police were heading toward my door when Paige stepped out. She gave me one last look of entreaty before heading toward the elevator. It took everything I had not to scream at her to stay, to be with me even if I was a fucking mess.

The cops didn’t look at her, their attention on me.

“Detective, Constable,” I said as the elevator doors closed on Paige’s face. “Come on in.”

35

Once they stepped in, I nodded toward the sofas. “I can’t offer you coffee but I have soft drinks.”

“We’re fine,” the senior officer answered.

Neri, meanwhile, had taken a seat but was scrutinizing everything around her without seeming to do much at all. She wouldn’t learn anything from this room—I’d had it decorated by an interior designer so it gave the right impression for a successful young author. The real me lived in the bedroom and study areas—mostly the study. Even Paige hadn’t spent much time in there . . . but I had allowed her in. The only lover I’d welcomed into that space.

“I resent anyone else in my writing area,” I’d said in that infamous interview where I’d been photographed on my bike. “It’s like they’re sucking my creative energy with their silent request for attention.”

The “prima donna” taunts had come quick and fast, but the quote had also spawned a number of think pieces by other creative types. One had written: “It eats away at my creative soul, this need that presses in on me on all sides. I crave the beautiful isolation of Thoreau’s Walden Pond and feel selfish for turning my back on those who offer me only love.”

Yep, one of my misanthropic brethren. Also one who hadn’t done his research. Thoreau’s cabin wasn’t in the middle of nowhere, he had plenty of company, and oh, he probably asked his mum for meal deliveries since she lived so close.

No one had ever had the balls to ask me why I published my work, if I was so set on solitary creativity. If they had, I’d tell them they were two different things. Two different Aaravs. One who wanted to shut out the world. And one who wanted to bask in the screaming attention of that same world.

“What can I do for you, Detective Senior Sergeant, Constable?” Polite and nonconfrontational was the order of the day until I knew what they wanted.

“Could you go through the events of that night as you recall them?” Regan said.

I wondered if I should tell them about the knock to the head I’d taken in the accident and how it had shaken a few things from their usual places, but decided there was no point. They wouldn’t take me seriously if they knew I was under the close supervision of a neurosurgeon and a neurologist.

“I fell asleep to the sound of my parents arguing,” I began.

“Anything unusual in that?”

So, the police had gotten their hands on information about my parents’ vicious marriage. I wondered who’d given up that dirty little secret. If I had to guess, I’d say Diana. She’d always been fiercely loyal to my mother while being unable to stand my father. “No,” I said. “Might as well have been a lullaby.”

No one laughed.

“What time of night was that?”

“I don’t know exactly when, but it was late. They’d come back from some dinner or other—so I’d say it was after eleven. Usually, it’d be even later, but I guess with the weather turning so bad, they decided to head home.”

I frowned, thinking back to that night when my world had shifted on its axis. “I’d been to a party the night before.” Sixteen had been my transition from nerd to hot—that’s how one of my old classmates had put it in that same article.

“Aarav used to be this skinny, quiet nerd. No one bullied him because he always had the kind of smarts that gets respect, but he wasn’t popular. Then we went on summer break, and he came back built, and sort of intense-quiet. Nerd to hot.”

I’d been exactly the same boy, just one who’d grown into my body. “It was my first big party.” A chaos of lithe young bodies around a campfire on a beach, my first kiss a mash of mouths behind a sand dune. “To be honest, I had the hangover from hell the next day. I still wasn’t feeling too crash hot that night, and that’s why I went to bed earlyish for me.”

“Did you wake up at any point?”

“I heard a woman’s scream—my mother’s—and it woke me up.”

Regan leaned forward. “How can you be sure of what you heard if you woke out of a deep sleep?”

“That scream’s haunted me for ten years.” I held his dishwater-blue gaze. “I almost went back to sleep again, but then I heard the front door slam twice.”