“That might end up in your favor.” The lawyer glanced at her slim gold watch. “Call me the second they contact you again. I’ve seen that look before—Regan’s a bulldog and he’s focused on you.”

I waited until I was in my car and away from the station before flipping off my mask of careless indifference. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”

I hadn’t hurt her.

I hadn’t.

52

Skin hot, a throb at the back of my head, I used the car’s hands-free system to make a call to Shanti. “Is my father home?” He worked six days a week as a rule, then threw in the occasional Sunday as well.

“No, he’s still at the plant.”

“I’m going to see him,” I said, then hung up before Shanti could ask any questions.

Ishaan Rai’s pride and joy was situated on a massive piece of land on the outskirts of a South Auckland suburb, a gleaming glass-and-steel structure that was a quiet sign of the high-tech manufacturing that went on within. Rolling green lawns behind high fences separated the manufacturing center from the public without being an eyesore.

The company pay structure started not at the minimum wage, but the living wage.

My father, the great humanitarian business-leader.

The security guard at the small gate station waved at me with a smile when I stopped in front of the locked gates. But he still picked up the phone and verified I was cleared to enter before letting me through. When you worked for a company known for cutting-edge advances in medical manufacture, you trusted no one.

Paranoia was considered an asset.

I parked in a visitor spot.

“You could have all this,” my father had said to me when I was eighteen. “You could lead a multimillion-dollar corporation. You could still scribble your stories in your spare time.”

Sometimes I wondered how my father was oblivious to the fact I hadn’t done a single science paper in my senior years of high school. I was as well qualified to run this company as I was to operate on someone’s brain. Pari was the one who’d inherited my father’s scientific mind, though I didn’t know if he’d ever see that through his patriarchal blinkers.

The security guard on duty at reception cleared me up to my father’s office on the third floor of the sprawling network of interconnected buildings. My father had a phone to his ear when I entered his office, but hung up with a quick “I’ll call you back” after he spotted me.

A small golden statue of a Hindu god sat in an alcove to his right, several flowers at its base and an incense stand beside it. Shanti’s hand. Praying over her husband. To my father, it was nothing but theater. Quietly showcasing his piety and goodness.

“Did you say anything to those cops?” he demanded as I sat down in his visitor chair with my leg stretched out. “You should’ve waited until you’d spoken to me.”

Shanti must’ve called him after I got taken in. “Why? It’s not like I had anything to hide.” If there was one thing of which I was certain, it was that my father liked having power over others. Under no circumstances could he know about my memory issues.

“Are you stupid, boy?” It came out a gritted insult. “Nothing to hide? You go out after your mother that night, smash up Shane’s bike in the process, and end up with a broken leg very close to where we now know she went off the road, and you think it’s not a problem?”

His hands were fisted on the desk, the vein in his temple pulsing. “I don’t know why I wasted time going after you that night. I should’ve left you to die of the cold.”

Bile burned my throat, the little I had in my stomach threatening to eject itself, but I forced a smile. “I’m not the one with a bloodstained rug I had to throw out.” It was a wild stab in the dark.

“That bitch was the one who started throwing the glasses,” my father said with a sneer. “Just because I had better aim, she’s suddenly a saint?” A snort. “It wasn’t even a big cut. Rug would’ve been salvageable if you hadn’t vomited all over it after getting home from the hospital. Had to rip the doctors a new one to get you onto other painkillers.”

My hand squeezed the end of the chair arm. “You cut her that night, you admit it.”

“It was nothing, a flesh wound after a shard of glass ricocheted off the mantelpiece.” My father shrugged. “The way she screamed, you’d have thought I’d stabbed her, but the bitch was barely bleeding when she left.

“She probably drove herself into the bush despite what the cops think—she was off-her-face with vodka. And she had the gall to swipe my most expensive whiskey as she walked out the door, just to spite me.”

A fragment of memory crashed through the blockade created by my broken brain.

“You can’t drive! You’re trashed, you whore!”

“Try to stop me, you limp-dicked bastard!”

“Put down the damn whiskey, Nina. You know how much that’s worth?”

“Oh, bechara Ishi. You can lick it off the road after I pour it out!”

Echoes of words spoken by ghosts, bouncing inside my skull. Real memories? Or ones my mind was manufacturing based on the fuel of my father’s words? “You’re saying you didn’t hurt Mum that night?”

My father held my gaze. “I stayed home and fucked my secretary.” He smiled, hard and bright. “You didn’t know that, did you? Aurelie had the brass balls to come knock on my door after she saw Nina leave. And since she was offering, I accepted. Then I kicked her ass out when you messaged to say you’d gone off the road.”

Aurelie had lied after all. My father looked too self-satisfied to be telling anything but the truth. But why had she done it? Because it placed her in the house during the critical time period? What, after all, had I seen? Red taillights driving off into the distance. My mother could’ve already been dead, Aurelie in the driver’s seat, with my father following to make sure she didn’t lose her nerve.