“Mags and Paulie are wild, Ari. The kind of wild I want to be when I’m a wicked white-haired budiya.”

Wild people often hungered for new highs, for constant new doses of adrenaline. It had been drug-fueled orgies in their youth. Had it become murder in their senior years?

I tracked their movements, my brain in high gear . . . until it came to a screeching halt on the memory of those manic emails to Dr. Binchy, my mind skittering from person to person to person, leveling blame. And never looking at myself . . . never facing the memory of a motorcycle ride on a rainy night.

I pushed my foot to the pedal.

Trixi and Lexi raised their hands in hello as I passed, but I didn’t pause; I had no need to relive what had happened the previous night.

For the first time, I barely flinched when I drove past the site of my mother’s murder, my hands painfully tight on the steering wheel. Arriving two minutes late to my session with Dr. Jitrnicka, I walked straight in.

“Why don’t we ever talk about Paige?” I demanded the instant we were seated.

The doctor took off his round eyeglasses and buffed them clean on his navy sweater. “Because you made it clear she was off-limits when you first came here.” He watched me with those gentle empathic eyes. “I’m very glad you’re ready now—as I said when we began, she’s critical to who you are today. Your downward spiral began with her suicide.”

“She wasn’t trying to commit suicide. She was just . . .”

No judgment in that face that was just a little too long for perfect symmetry. “From what I’ve learned in the media, Paige Jani had mental health struggles.”

“She was seeing a therapist. She told me to go see one.”

“We’re not magic, Aarav. It’s a truth I had to accept early on in my career.”

Getting up, I paced the room in jerky steps, my crutches sinking into the thick carpet. “I only ever asked her one thing. Just one.”

“Are you willing to share what that was?”

The words burned bright against my brain. “Do what you want, but if you’re ever going to leave me, tell me first. Don’t just go.”

“Ah.”

Yes, it didn’t take a shrink to figure out why I’d made that demand. The funny thing was, I didn’t think I’d ever asked for the same promise from any other woman. At least not that I remembered. But right now, my memories were worth fuck-all.

The scream I’d heard that night reverberated in my skull.

Had I truly heard it? Or had it been born out of my hatred of my father?

“That explains why you didn’t attend Paige’s funeral.”

I hadn’t? No, I hadn’t.

My gut grew heavy under a nauseating weight of sensory memory: of vodka, of vomit, of my own body odor.

“Fuck, mate, you can’t do this shit.” Kahu, dragging me off the couch and throwing me into the shower. He’d put together an omelet out of the few ingredients he could find in my fridge, made me eat it.

Then he’d sat there, looked me in the eye, and said, “I don’t have any other real friends, you a-hole. You’re whānau to me at this point. I can’t lose you. So we sit here until you stop shaking and wanting more of that poison, and then we get you into rehab, therapy, whatever the fuck it takes.”

Kahu had saved me. Then I’d gone and stolen his girl. No wonder he’d been pissed.

“She left you without warning,” Dr. Jitrnicka verbalized, as if that wasn’t obvious. “Though according to media reports, she did pen a suicide note.”

I couldn’t remember the note, but if the police had given it back to me, I’d have kept it. It’d be in my safe. “Is that why I had a random woman in my car the night I crashed?”

“You know she was only the latest in a long line since Paige’s death.” He tapped his pen lightly against his notes. “That’s why I’m so concerned about the discovery of your mother’s remains and its emotional impact. It’s a case of trauma upon trauma.”

No wonder my mind was a fractured mess.

I finally sat down, my left leg incredibly heavy. “Paige was . . . kind. She tried to look after me, tried to help me. Obviously, I screwed up and didn’t do the same for her.”

“You know nothing is ever that simple. I never knew Paige, but it appears she had her own demons to battle.”

That ghostly bottle of kombucha left untouched, as she’d so often left her food untouched. The sounds I’d regularly heard coming from the bathroom. The way she’d refused to look at images of herself when it was her business to be in those images.

The small bundle, complete with syringe, that I’d discovered after her death.

Outward manifestations of an inner agony that had made her whimper in her sleep.

I’d disposed of the bundle and syringe without sharing the find with the police, not wanting the tabloids to use the information to smear her memory. Even angry with her, I hadn’t hurt her . . . because I’d loved her.

“I wish she’d made a different choice that day,” I said, and for a moment, I didn’t know to which day I was referring.

The day I lost my mother or the day I lost Paige.

47

The first thing I did after the appointment was go to my apartment and open the safe inside my study. I’d hidden the note at the very bottom of the pile of things I had in there; it was still inside a police evidence bag.

Unsealing it, I pulled out a piece of floral notepaper.

I’d bought her that paper after figuring out that my sophisticated model girlfriend loved all things girly and sweet and soft. She’d sprayed each sheet with her perfume before she wrote on it.