all the blood vessels making tongues heal abnormally fast. The rest of my body, however, was sore down to the bone. Under my clothes I looked like a ruined peach, bruised yellow and black and deep purple and brown.
My lawyer said, “Nothing has changed since last week.”
“Let’s go through it again,” the detective said. “That could trigger—”
“She’s doing that. With her therapist,” my lawyer interrupted. “Should her therapy bear helpful fruit, rest assured we will contact you.”
“Her testimony could—”
“Yes,” my lawyer cut him off again. “I realize it would be very convenient for you if she did remember. With her testimony you could convict that boy without having to look for any pesky evidence or investigate. But that is not her job. Her job is to get well.”
I stared down at my hands. In one of the occasional chairs, off to the side, some sort of junior lawyer was taking notes and looking stern. There was a junior cop, too, sitting opposite him, with an equal and opposing notebook. They didn’t really matter in this room. The people who mattered were my lawyer and the detective. After that my parents. Dad tall and imposing in a bespoke suit that cost more than this cop made in a month and my mother, sitting slim and straight beside me. I should speak, I thought, but me and the lackeys, we felt so incidental. I had no power in this room.
“My job is to sit here and ask questions until I get a thorough statement,” the detective said, firm.
“I’m sure that suits Mitch. He bills by the hour,” my father said, and my lawyer chuckled, holding up a calming hand.
“We all know who caused the accident,” my mother snapped, uncalmed.
We did. Tig had been driving. My parents and my lawyer said so. The police said so, and it made sense. It was his car. He always drove.
Except the once, earlier that same night. But I hadn’t mentioned that.
I’d left that out. But not on purpose. Not like the kiss. I had just . . . left it out.
My lawyer said, “You arrested the boy for it already.”
I’d known it was coming, but still. My gaze flew to the detective’s face for confirmation, and I found it there. My mother put her free hand on my thigh, a hard, grounding grasp that dumped me into my body. All at once I felt my bulk taking up more than my fair share of the sofa.
When I glanced up, the detective’s eyes on me seemed so kind. He seemed to see my misery, my fear. He looked at me as if the lawyers and my parents and his junior cop were more pieces of expensive furniture. As if I were the one who mattered in this room.
He said, right to me, “Sometimes people don’t remember things because they don’t want to. Because it’s hard. Now, your friend made a bad decision, and he has to pay for that. But he’s a kid, and I want him to get treated like one. You should know the D.A. is willing to deal. Tighler will have to serve a little time, no way around that, but hopefully in a juvenile facility. If it goes to trial, though, the D.A. will push to try him as an adult. He could be looking at fifteen years. Inside a real grown-up prison. Your statement could be the lever he needs to take this plea. You’d be helping him, Amy.”
My mother’s hand clamped harder, pulling my gaze down to her slender fingers digging into the meat of my thigh. She wanted me to say that I remembered Tig driving. She wanted it maybe more than the cop did. I heard her draw breath, breath to make words, and my lawyer cut her off so smoothly he did not even seem rushed.
“But Amy does not remember the accident. She shouldn’t lie and say she does”—he paused, nostrils flaring, and his next words came out dripping with sarcasm—“even to help her friend.”
“It could help her as well,” the detective said, unfazed. “When he heard all the charges, Tighler Simms finally gave us his statement. He says she was driving.”
Beside me my mother gasped, and I heard my father’s sharp inhale as well. In my lap my hands went cold. My fingers felt like my tongue after the emergency-room doctor had injected it with the local. Dead flesh, not my own. My bruises pulsed in tandem with my heart.
At that same moment, three memories bloomed whole