was so set on solitary creativity. If they had, I’d tell them they were two different things. Two different Aaravs. One who wanted to shut out the world. And one who wanted to bask in the screaming attention of that same world.
“What can I do for you, Detective Senior Sergeant, Constable?” Polite and nonconfrontational was the order of the day until I knew what they wanted.
“Could you go through the events of that night as you recall them?” Regan said.
I wondered if I should tell them about the knock to the head I’d taken in the accident and how it had shaken a few things from their usual places, but decided there was no point. They wouldn’t take me seriously if they knew I was under the close supervision of a neurosurgeon and a neurologist.
“I fell asleep to the sound of my parents arguing,” I began.
“Anything unusual in that?”
So, the police had gotten their hands on information about my parents’ vicious marriage. I wondered who’d given up that dirty little secret. If I had to guess, I’d say Diana. She’d always been fiercely loyal to my mother while being unable to stand my father. “No,” I said. “Might as well have been a lullaby.”
No one laughed.
“What time of night was that?”
“I don’t know exactly when, but it was late. They’d come back from some dinner or other—so I’d say it was after eleven. Usually, it’d be even later, but I guess with the weather turning so bad, they decided to head home.”
I frowned, thinking back to that night when my world had shifted on its axis. “I’d been to a party the night before.” Sixteen had been my transition from nerd to hot—that’s how one of my old classmates had put it in that same article.
“Aarav used to be this skinny, quiet nerd. No one bullied him because he always had the kind of smarts that gets respect, but he wasn’t popular. Then we went on summer break, and he came back built, and sort of intense-quiet. Nerd to hot.”
I’d been exactly the same boy, just one who’d grown into my body. “It was my first big party.” A chaos of lithe young bodies around a campfire on a beach, my first kiss a mash of mouths behind a sand dune. “To be honest, I had the hangover from hell the next day. I still wasn’t feeling too crash hot that night, and that’s why I went to bed earlyish for me.”
“Did you wake up at any point?”
“I heard a woman’s scream—my mother’s—and it woke me up.”
Regan leaned forward. “How can you be sure of what you heard if you woke out of a deep sleep?”
“That scream’s haunted me for ten years.” I held his dishwater-blue gaze. “I almost went back to sleep again, but then I heard the front door slam twice.”
“How do you know it was the front door?”
“My room’s always been right above it—I know the sound.”
“And you’re sure it was twice?”
“Yes. With a gap in between of a few seconds. I ran to the balcony that overlooks the street—I knew both my parents had been drinking and I didn’t want them driving.” It didn’t matter if they knew the truth now; this wasn’t a drunk-driving case . . . or was it? Had my father skidded out and just left my mother there? Murder by incompetence? “I was calling out my mother’s name, but I’d injured my leg and . . .”
My eyes fell on my leg, on the moon boot.
“A broken limb?”
Jerking out of the strange slip in time, I shook my head, the facts having re-emerged in my bruised brain. “No, I’d cut myself when I fell onto some glass at the party and I had stitches all up my calf.” The faint line was still there, a scar that marked the night of my mother’s death. “It made me slow, and then the door to the balcony stuck. It always used to do that in the rain.”
I could feel the strain in my biceps from how hard I’d had to pull at it, how I’d struggled with the lock. “It was too late by the time I got out there and called out for my mum to stop. All I could see through the storm were the red taillights of her car and then the Jaguar was moving down the Cul-de-Sac and away into the night.”
Neri, who’d been silent throughout, said, “You’re sure it was her vehicle you saw?”