the rails because his parents had a shitty relationship.
I kept on scrolling.
Nothing. Just that cast, the plaster of it unmistakable even in the most grainy shots. But I knew there had to be more photos out there. Who else did I know that was a compulsive clicker and poster?
Alice.
I wanted to kick myself. I’d commented on her obsession more than once since moving to my father’s house. And Alice being Alice, her entire online profile was wide-open. She wanted the likes, wanted the vapid admiration that came with being one of the rich “housewives” of the city. It was such a niche area to inhabit—I’d gone down the rabbit hole of it once while I was bored and alone after the accident.
Alice, I’d discovered, was friends with a network of other “housewives”—I always thought of the term in quotes, because like Alice, half these women had jobs, a number of them very high-powered. The other half all had so much staff that the only housewifely thing they probably did was sign off on the odd dinner menu, or instruct the maid on how many people were coming over for late-afternoon cocktails.
Suddenly my breath sped up, my heart pumping. Shit. Shit. I’d forgotten to make notes about the earlier photos. What if I forgot? What if I’d already forgotten?
Snatching up the notebook with trembling fingers, I flipped through to the last used page. I remembered writing those lines about my meeting with my father. There were no other cryptic notes. Forcing my breathing out of its panic cycle, I began to make short, sharp notes about my current research.
My hand was cramped in the aftermath and my handwriting so shambolic that it probably looked like I was on speed, but I’d gotten it all down.
All of what I remembered.
Opening the sweets drawer, I pulled out a wrapped piece of fudge and put it in my mouth. I relished the taste, but stopped my hand from reaching for a second piece. No doubt I’d need another sugar hit soon. Might as well try to pace myself since the no-sugar thing was a total failure. After successfully fighting off the churning in my stomach, I began to go through the images on Alice’s profile.
And hit the jackpot.
We’d had Cul-de-Sac parties back then, spearheaded by Diana. She’d stopped at some point, maybe because she was tired of being the only one who tried to organize fun stuff, but more likely because she’d gotten busy with her kids’ activities. But the parties had been a fixture in my teenage years. The one from which I found photos had taken place a month or so after my mother’s disappearance—and it had been organized by Alice.
In very bad taste for it to go ahead if people had known she was dead, but just slightly awkward if they’d believed she’d abandoned her family and run off with a quarter of a million dollars. I remembered that party, mostly because of how pissed I’d been at my father for driving away my mother. I’d stopped thinking about the scream by then, telling myself that if she’d been able to handle the Jag, she must’ve been fine. I’d even gone to the party, just another surly teenager.
A pulse of pain up my leg.
Wincing, I rubbed at my thigh even though it hadn’t been injured in the crash. And I wondered how my mind had so carefully edited out all mention of my cast from my memories of that time. Dr. Jitrnicka would no doubt have something to say on the point—there was probably a psychological explanation for why my memory issues seemed concentrated around this one seminal event in my life.
There.
A younger version of me seated in someone’s deck chair out on the main drive, with Beau beside me, and my cast a masterpiece of signatures and drawings. I didn’t look grim or angry despite the fact I’d been full of fury. I was half-smiling as I held a bottle of Coke in hand, while Beau was turned toward me, his mouth caught open midspeech. Another chatty kid who’d turned into a secretive teen.
My face looked thinner than usual, but bore no bruises or scrapes. Neither did my hands. But a month was a lot of time when it came to healing superficial injuries.
I needed more photos.
In my determination to unearth the truth, I scrolled back too far . . . and there she was: my mother, resplendent in a dress of vivid aquamarine, sunglasses on top of her head