Part One
Twenty-Three Years Ago
EVERYONE WAS LOOKINGat him.
No. Not everyone. All thewomenwere looking at him, and in a way that should be illegal because Kazeyuki Collington was seventeen years old.
The receptionist at the front desk. The female officer refilling her coffee by the vending machine. Even the woman who had come in to report her stolen bicycle, who had somehow completely forgotten about the bicycle the moment Kazeyuki and his father walked in, and was now just sitting there, holding her form, staring.
He didn't notice any of them.
He was looking at his hands.
"Mr. Collington, are you even listening to me?"
Kazeyuki's gaze lifted. The man across the table from him was Officer Quaid, and Officer Quaid hated him. That much had been obvious from the moment they walked into this room. Quaid's ex had recently left him for a younger man, and Kazeyuki had the misfortune of being the same kind of pretty. All good looks but no fucking heart. That was how Quaid saw him, and nothing that happened in this room was going to change his mind.
"I'm sorry—"
"Fuck being sorry!"
"Sir!"Jackie Hecht was on her feet before the second word had finished leaving Quaid's mouth, and the attorney's voice could have cut glass. "You are harassing my client, and he is aminor—"
"Am I? Am I harassing your client?" Quaid's chair screeched back as he stood, his face mottled red, and his voice was shaking now in a way that told Kazeyuki this was no longer about the case at all. "Like that girl harassedhim? Because he was so fucking harassed that a girl thinks he has a nice face, he told her to fuck off, and now she's killed herself. Is that what you want me to do? Fuck off and kill—"
Nagi Collington looked at the police chief.
That was all.
Chief Simon Shue went white. He was already moving before the silence could settle, already barking Quaid's name, and it took two of his colleagues to pull the officer from the room. Even as they dragged him through the door, Quaid's eyes stayed on Kazeyuki, and whatever was burning behind them was older and more personal than Inori.
But Kazeyuki didn't know that yet.
All he knew was that Quaid wasn't wrong.
Shue couldn't stop apologizing. He was still apologizing when Jackie Hecht cut him off, still apologizing as she gathered her things, and still apologizing as she steered both Collingtons out of the station and into the cold. The boy was a minor. The boy was the victim. And the boy's father was the billionaire whose family name was on the hospital, the recreation center, and half the commercial property in Arlington. Shue knew what this meant for his career. Everyone in the building did.
Jackie handled the rest. She was good at that.
The limousine pulled away from the station, and Arlington slid past through the tinted glass, its small-town streets lined with snow-dusted oaks, every storefront window carrying a name his family had either built or paid for. The town looked the same as it always had.
Kazeyuki was looking at his hands.
Nagi waited until the partition between them and the chauffeur was raised before he turned to his son.
"Daijoubu ka?" Are you holding up alright?
"Motto yasashiku dekita hazu desu." I could've been gentler.
A pause.
"Aa, sou da na." Yes. You could've been.His father's voice was quiet."Demo ano ko mo, motto tsuyoku nareta kamo shirenai."But the girl could have also been stronger.
Kazeyuki didn't speak.
Since he was a child, he had known that he was born to be a doctor. A man who saved lives, who healed what was broken, who put people back together.
Not someone who caused a girl to lose hers.
