“But my friend is—”
He puts his hand over my mouth, the warmth dropping from his gaze. “You’ll come home with me.” When he takes his hand away, he smooths the hair back from my forehead. “Don’t worry. I’ll make it worth your while.”
CHAPTERTEN
CAYLON
I arrive home just before dawn. The stain of pink along the horizon makes me angry. I should have been in bed and asleep for hours now. Instead, I’ll be groggy and cotton-headed, even if I sleep in.
No one to blame but myself.
Oh, but that applies to so many things. Most of them too blurry to understand properly.
I let Em escape, thinking I’d catch up with her later. That’s the nature of parties, isn’t it? You talk with people, move on, rotate around the rooms to reach them again.
By the time I started a serious campaign to find her, she’d gone. Her car was still parked nearby, and I’d waited in mine, lurking like the neighbourhood stalker, but she didn’t return to it.
My mind is equally torn between envisaging her going home alone to get a good night’s sleep and the more likely scenario of her leaving to go spend the night with someone else.
I head for the kitchen, then hear a noise from the living room and divert there instead. Mum sits on the couch, clutching a cushion to her chest, staring as Freddy Kruger trails his knife fingers along a dimly lit wall.
“One, two,” I sing from the doorway, making her jump and laugh. “What’re you doing up?”
“I’m the one meant to be asking questions,” she says, tossing some popcorn at my chest. “What is my teenage son doing coming home at this hour?”
I eat the piece of popcorn I caught and scoop up the rest to toss in the bin. “He’s coming home from a party. What’s your excuse?”
“Are you drunk? You don’t look drunk.” She squints at me from the couch, and I wonder how long she’s been sat here, staring at movies we’ve seen a thousand times over.
“That’s because I’m not.” I toss my keys on the table and take a seat next to her. My laptop—the good one not the school one—is sitting open on the coffee table. “Glad to see you’re taking my privacy as seriously as always.”
“Got to keep tabs on you somehow. Besides, sons shouldn’t have secrets from their mothers,” she replies easily, not showing any signs of bother that I caught her out. “Why’re you researching billionaires?”
I help myself to a handful of popcorn from her bowl. Her reference to secrets might sound great in theory but I can’t imagine what it would be like to tell her about the biggest one on my mind. She knows Robbie left, knows I was distraught after, but doesn’t have any further details.
She doesn’t know about Zach shooting him. About how I stayed behind with the clean-up crew and got far too good a look at what happens on their side of the business.
Along with missing his company, I also miss the space Robbie earmarked for himself, above his father’s storage warehouse. It was a brilliant spot to hide from life. I’ve found a replacement, but it’s not the same. Too small. Too far away from the city. More like a prepper retreat than a place to hang.
Especially since there’s no one else to hang with. I haven’t told anybody else it even exists.
“Why are you looking at my laptop when I’m at a party?” I fire back, tossing some kernels in my mouth. “Shouldn’t you be doing art therapy or something?”
“Ha-ha.” She wakes the computer and slides it along the table to me. “You want to tell me about this? Investigating elites might be fun but if they find out you’re doing it, any career you want might be short-lived.”
I check the screen and swallow the mouthful of popcorn the wrong way. Once I finish spluttering, I pull the laptop onto my knees and start typing, trying to trace how Mum ended up in the middle of the government website.
Sorry, not the middle. More like the back end.
“How’d you…?” I stop speaking as I pull out the last few pages of code from the command screens and run the entries through my head, starting from last and going backwards, until I understand how she broke into a repository she has no business accessing.
No business at all. Just like me.
“You’ll need his driver’s licence if you want more,” she says with her crooked smile.
Some of it’s down to the shape of her top lip, a snag where a harelip never got fully corrected. Most of it’s because of the time her jaw was shattered when she was pushed out of a moving car. The same thing that makes her chew funny.
Just part of a fun adventure without meds. We’re probably overdue for another.
