“You have the right to an attorney and to have them present during any questioning. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you.”
I felt Eva’s glare bore into my skin. Shame swelled hot inside me, and I dug the toe of my shoe into the layer of moss growing over the kitchen tiles at my feet.
“Do you understand the rights I have just read to you?”
The question snapped me out of my daze, and I looked up at the man I’d murdered eight summers before.
“I understand.”
Chapter 9
Arthur,
Before
Mom lifted the strap of her camera bag over her head and slung it across my shoulder, careful as always to not let her fingers touch my skin. “There’s a fresh roll inside,” she said.
My chest tightened, and I thought of the summer she’d rented out a darkroom and taught me the painstaking process of photo development. The sharp bite of chemicals had filled my nose as we’d loaded the film reel into a developing tank. Mom had explained each step, so patient with me then. Developer first, to expose the image. A stop bath to neutralize it. Fixer to remove all unexposed silver halides and make a picture permanent.
It was chemistry to her. Magic to me.
“Be good for Jack,” Mom said softly.
Emotion clogged the space between my ribs, making words impossible.
As she stepped off the porch, Mom wiggled her fingers, a sad little smile playing at the corners of her mouth. Jack walked her to the Volkswagen, quietly saying something as he opened her door that I didn’t quite catch. Mom huffed a laugh and shook her head.
“I’m sorry about your nose.”
I all but jumped out of my skin as Eva appeared, holding a bright yellow plate and a trio of blueberry muffins, her smile rueful.
Jack was speaking again. I strained to hear, my attention slipping off his daughter. Mom scrawled something on a scrap of paper spread on the dashboard, then held it out to Jack, who pocketed it.
“Do you like blueberries?”
“I… What?”
The bee girl set the plate down and hopped onto the porch rail, her legs swinging underneath her. It seemed a strangely childlike gesture for someone who appeared to be my age. Sixteen, maybe seventeen at the most?
“I should have asked, before. I’m not bad at streusel, if you’d prefer that.”
She was making it so hard to focus. I shook my head, though I didn’t have anything against muffins, really. I’d simply lost my appetite.
Jack stepped back, and Mom slammed the door shut, her plastic smile slipping. As the Volkswagen rolled, spitting dust in its wake, the last string of hope in me snapped.
“Do you—”
I turned and bolted into the mudroom, fleeing the incessant line of questions.
Jack had put me in a spare room off the kitchen. Its main features included towers of fabric stacked against the wall and an old metal sewing machine thick with dust.
I locked the door and plopped down onto the bed. The pillowcase smelled like lemons.
I slept fitfully, hating how Mom filled the empty space even when she wasn’t there. I hated that I cared, when she clearly didn’tgive a shit about me. Who the hell dumped their kid off with a stranger, anyway?
The sewing room was a saccharine prison in Pepto-Bismol pink. For days, I avoided the Moreaus, stewing in my irritation as I read my books behind a locked door. But it seemed the more pages I turned, the more my anger calcified into something duller, something hard and cold. The monster was numbing me up again. It was the only real defense we had. When you can’t change something, you have to find a way not to care about it so much.
Jack kept a plate of leftovers for me on constant rotation in the fridge. I didn’t have the heart to tell him how the ribs and chicken thighs turned my stomach.
