Her hands are in her lap. She's not looking at me.
"The car accident I had when I was 16." Her voice is careful, the way you hold something fragile. "It was me who was driving the car."
I hear the sentence.
I can't make it mean anything.
Sienna was driving. I was at the crash site and she told me herself. Didn’t she? I have had that scene in my head for ten years.
The yard is still going on around me. Someone's radio. The clanking of tools.
"You were driving?" I hear my own voice. "And Sienna…?"
"She wasn't even in the car with me." Charlotte's voice is very quiet. "I hadn't seen her in years prior to that day. I was with my boyfriend. We had a few drinks. The car was new." She stops. Swallows. "I was speeding."
She keeps talking and I don't hear the sentences in order. They arrive but my brain isn't connecting them to anything.
"Why?" It's the only word that comes out.
Charlotte's hands are pressed together. She's looking at them. "I lied because I was scared it would go on record. You know that I always wanted to be a police officer. I couldn't have that on my record." Her voice is small now. Young. "I was sixteen and I was scared and I was selfish. I told myself Sienna would be fine. Her family had money. That it would just be a fine and it would go away." She stops. "I convinced myself she would be fine. I convinced myself of that."
I shake my head in disbelief.
"Why would Sienna lie and take the blame?"
Charlotte bites her lower lip. Her eyes move away across the yard to Sienna. She's quiet for a long moment. When she looks back at me her eyes are wet. "I think that is something that you need to hear from her. I just want to say that I'm sorry that I lied to you all these years and allowed you to hate her for so long."
Hate.
I look at Sienna at the gate. At the easy way she stands with the officers, the way her hands move when she's explaining something.
I don't think I ever hated her. Not really. I hated her father. I hated what I thought she was. I hated the idea of her, the version I had built from secondhand damage and old rage.
Hate is what I feel for myself when I think of what I did to her.
37
ADRIAN
I can feel the bass vibrating through the floor, through the furniture, up into my chest. I used to like the way Vanta carries sound. The way that the VIP catches the vibration without drowning in it, the insulation of being above everything while still feeling the same current.
I don't like it now.
"What do you mean Charlotte was driving the car?" I feel my blood go icy when William tell us what his sister confided to him this afternoon.
I stand up. Sit back down.
My stomach is wrong.
The leather of the VIP seating feels wrong under my hands. I look around the section like it might be different than it was minutes ago. Same low lighting. Same clean surfaces. The bottle of whisky between us, condensation starting to form on the glass from the ice. Through the floor below I can hear the crowd, the music that has been playing since we arrived, and underneathit a burst of laughter, a woman, bright and free, a sound that belongs to a completely different night.
I want it to stop.
All of it. The laughing and the bass. The particular warmth of this room that I know too well, that I have spent a hundred evenings in and that now feels like it's pressing in on all sides at once. Below us, someone pops a bottle. Cheers. More laughter. The whole building going on like normal.
People down there are having the best night of their week while up here the air is claustrophobic. William is not moving, Carter has his eyes focused on a point ahead of him and I am trying to keep my thinking organized and failing at it.
I look for the logic and it's not there. I try again. Still not there. The part of my brain that builds cases is just blank.
