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.
My father might be telling the truth . . . but lying about the timing.
“Convenient,” I said. “Will she back you up if I ask?”
“If she has a single brain cell, she’ll keep her mouth shut.” My father leaned back in his leather chair. “She was stalking Nina, you know that? Nina saw her—and I emailed Aurelie about it. Still have her reply admitting to it.”
His smile was razor-edged. “She came back two weeks after Nina vanished, but I was bored of her by then and let her know it—I was pretty sure you heard her bawling in my study, but you never said anything about it.”
I kept my silence, because his words hit a total blank in my mind. My father was a master game-player, and right now, I had no idea which game he was playing. “Except you just said she was with you when Mum drove away.”
He shrugged. “She’s smarter than she ever let on. For all I know, she paid someone to off Nina.” The faintest stretching of his skin over his bones. “If she did and I’d known that at the time, I’d have put my hands around her neck and squeezed the life out of her. Nina was mine.”