“Why don’t you bring Nana and Nani to visit us?” I’d asked her once.
“Oh, mera pyara beta,” she’d said, her fingers sliding over my cheek.
That’s all the answer I’d ever gotten: Oh, my sweet boy.
But the older I grew, the less I’d needed her to put the truth into words. In their neat little home in rural India, complete with a shiny TV that my mother had sent them the money to buy, new tiled floors, and pretty curtains, my grandparents could imagine that their daughter was living a glorious life “abroad” with a wonderful, generous husband.
My father had been generous with his money in one sense—he’d set up accounts at designer boutiques all over the city. My mother could always send him invoices for clothing and jewelry. Things that made her look good on his arm. She’d also had a credit card for lunches out with the girls, that type of thing.
The bills had gone to my father, so he could question her on any unusual purchases.
So the money she’d sent to her parents and the money she’d put in my account? She’d gathered that by buying designer items from the boutiques, then waiting a bit before reselling them online.
My father had kept my mother on a financial leash. I’d always thought her plan was to save enough to be able to take him on in court, but then she’d vanished and all he’d lost was half the value of the house.
I sent an email to the funeral director with a zipped file of photos.
Job done. Normalcy achieved.
Almost able to feel my mother’s breath on my nape, I got out of the chair and made my way downstairs, the crutches thudding on every step. I made it to my car without running into anyone else—Mia had long since returned to her home, and Pari was probably doing homework in her room.
The notebook in my back pocket was digging into my butt, so I took it out and threw it in the glove box. I was driving past the café when I spotted Lily closing up. The sight threw some switch in the back of my mind, disgorging the fact that tonight was one of the few nights when she wasn’t open. She must’ve stayed late to do paperwork or a stocktake.
Stopping the car, I rolled down the window. “Want to come for a ride?”
She gave me a narrow-eyed look, glanced down at the brown paper bag in her hand, then shrugged. “Yes, okay.”
She brought with her the smell of sugar and coffee. “Leftover pastries,” she said, stretching around to put the bag in the backseat before shrugging out of her black fleece. “Where are we going?”
I hadn’t thought about it. “The Huia Lookout?” It’d be empty at this time, especially with the winds having begun to swirl.
“Sure.” She settled back, trim and neat in her black uniform.
We didn’t speak the entire drive to the lookout, and darkness had begun to fall by the time we arrived, but it wasn’t pitch-dark yet, the world caught between night and day. There were no other cars in the small parking area surrounded by green, the picnic table empty.
Walking together through the wind, we found our way to the lookout itself. The land fell away in a dizzying drop around us, the mountains in the distance huge goliaths and the water out front as dark as the horizon.
Below, the tops of the barely visible tree ferns looked deceptively welcoming and soft.
Fall from this height and nothing would stop your descent as you tumbled screaming through the ferns and the trees. Perhaps the splintered branches would eventually hook into your clothes or limbs, your body a broken doll hanging in the air, but you wouldn’t be alive to appreciate the bloody artistry of it.
“I could kill someone here.”
Lily jerked and took a step back.
“In fiction.” I grinned. “Sorry, hazard of a writer’s brain.”
Dark eyes scanned my face, before Lily’s lips twitched. “You always were a bit weird. I was cleaning your room once and I found this exercise book full of notes about forensics and how to hide bodies.”
“Research is important.”
Lily rubbed her hands up and down her arms, her gaze out toward the darkening waves of the Tasman Sea. “God, it’s breathtaking, isn’t it? Out here, you can forget that a whole city lives and breathes less than an hour away.”
Turning away from her view and to the right, I could see the lights of a few houses, but