Bad choice or not, I couldn’t afford to lose the fever driving me to uncover the truth.

Since there was nothing I could do about Alice at that moment, I spent time working on my book. Fueled by the sweets that filled my veins with sugar, the words flowed out of me like the rain that turned the world outside into a foggy gray haze.

“I’ll pick up Pari,” I told Shanti when I came up for air; I had a vague memory of her asking if I wanted lunch, but despite missing the meal, I wasn’t hungry. Chocolate and fudge, the diet of champions. “I need the break anyway.”

The persistent rain turned my windscreen into a waterfall as I pulled away from the Cul-de-Sac. I wondered what Gigi would say if I told her I’d just written five thousand words in a manic rush . . . except that none of them had anything to do with the book I was contracted to deliver. I’d started writing what I thought was a short story about a young woman who goes out walking one day and doesn’t return.

Somehow, the character had ended up in the Waitākere Ranges Regional Park, shoving her way through sharp branches as panic clawed at her, her skin beginning to bleed and her breath to hurt. As she fought for her life, her improbably teenaged son got on a neighbor’s motorbike and raced off after her.

There was no logic to the entire jumbled mess.

Even worse, I hadn’t even known what I was doing until afterward, when I’d stared at what I’d written:

 The road was slick under the front wheel of the bike, water splashing up as he powered through the tiny lakes birthed by the rain. He had to be careful or he’d end up sprawled on the road, broken and battered and of no use to his mother.

 A turtle with no shell, a piece of meat without bones.

 She needed him. He could hear her calling to him.

What the hell was that? Just my subconscious working through the seeds the police had planted in my brain? That’s how I’d always dealt with hard emotional topics. By writing things down. Though usually, I was conscious of what I was doing.

Still, this wasn’t exactly a normal time. I couldn’t blame my brain for hijacking my plans. One thing I knew, however—I hadn’t gone after my mother that night. If I had, my bones wouldn’t burn with the echo of the vicious sense of helplessness I’d felt as her car disappeared into the storm.

The area around the school was crawling with cars, everyone trying to get close. But since the rain was beginning to let up a little, I parked half a block up, then began to make my way to the gate.

I saw Mia before I saw Pari.

Diana’s fifteen-year-old daughter was standing with Pari, the two of them in conversation. My sister’s face was bright-eyed and worshipful under her pink-with-white-polka-dots umbrella, while Mia had more of a teenage insouciance to her, her silky black hair coated with droplets of rain and the look in her uptilted eyes suggesting an awareness of her own beauty. And yet she never ignored Pari—that said something about Diana’s daughter.

Mia straightened when she spotted me, the delighted smile that broke out over her face momentarily easing the impression of the incipient adult, hovering on the edges of childhood. “Hi, Aarav.”

Shit.

I knew that look, but Mia was way too young for it.

38

Hey,” I said as Pari closed her umbrella and came to sort of side-hug me by sliding in an arm under the crutches. “You waiting for Diana?”

“Uh-huh.” Mia tucked one wing of shoulder-length hair behind her ear, her lips lush in a face with a striking bone structure that Diana said she’d inherited from Calvin’s mother.

I wondered what it was like for Calvin to look into his daughter’s face and see his dead mother looking back at him. And for the first time, I wondered what would happen should I ever decide to pass on my genes.

Would my own dead mother stare back at me from a child’s face?

“My friends are going to freak.” Mia’s skin flushed. “We all love your book, and Mum even took us to the movie. I had to totally beg, since it was like RP 16, but it was so uh-mazing.”

I knew the root of the adoration—it was the author photo on my books. No leather jacket, just a simple white shirt rolled up to the elbows paired with my favorite jeans, the camera catching my face as I lifted it in a half smile.

“Oh, anyone who likes men will lick this up,” Gigi had said when I’d sent her the shots. “And you need all the help you can get. With a five-thousand-dollar-per-book advance, no one’s going to be pushing your work. Might as well go for a few impulse buys.”

As it turned out, someone had pushed my book. An actor well known for being a big reader had randomly picked it up at an airport, then ended up stuck in his hotel room because of a riot in the streets below. He’d done a chapter-by-chapter dissection of Blood Sacrifice online as he read, and his millions of fans had followed along.

Gigi had sent me a text at the time:

 Gird your loins for a public massacre and for the love of all that is holy, stay offline and keep your lips zipped.

The reason for the warning? The actor had clearly started out intending to slaughter the book, having chosen “the most lurid cover in the poxy airport shop”—he’d even done a small video at the start making horrified faces and saying, “What the bollocks am I to do then? Stuck in this bloody arse-end of a room with only this minging trash for company.”

That was bullshit, since he had a phone and the ability to download a new read at any time, but the whole thing had been a show put on to entertain himself and his legions of followers.

The actor’s initial disdain was why the thread had ended up going viral. Because by the end of the book, he was just doing the barest updates.

Shit.

Fuck.

Oh hell no.