Those bruises wouldn’t leave my brain.
I walked around my house, picking things up and putting them down again. I tried to find reasons her body would be marked that way that didn’t point to the obvious, and discarded those too.
Someone had hurt her.
Someone had hurt her… recently.
The first rule of hacking is, know your target. So far, I’d misjudged her at every turn. And that was something I didn’t like to admit. Not to my clients, and not to myself.
She was hurting… and possibly hiding. And I’d pegged her as a spoiled Princess.
Why was I so convinced I had her all figured out?
I thought I knew her.
Shouldn’t I know her?
I wracked my brain. I knew I resented her for causing her family pain - hating the part of her that most resembled myself.
I knew I hated that she’d turned her back on the place that had raised her.
I knew I hated her plastic face and superficial boots - though on some level, I did love those boots more than I wanted to admit.
But… that was it. All I really knew of her.
I wracked my brain again. And this time…out of the mists, I was able to grasp something else I knew of her.
Music.
In a flash, I was back there in the high school hallway, so hungover that any sound was a pickax to my brain.
Except the sound of Aria. She was singing, and it pierced through the haze and made me stand up straighter. I’d tried to ask her what that beautiful song was. But she’d looked at me with such horror that I’d clammed up.
It was that look of horror that had cemented my feelings about Aria Jane Dolan.
But now I looked back on myself with horror, too. Red-eyed and stumbling my way to third period, my clothes still stinking from last night’s bender - maybe she was right to look at me that way.
One wrong look and I’d judged her forever.
And that judgment, like all my other poor judgments back then, was coming back to bite me in the ass.
Irritated with mindlessly pacing, I sat down in my chair. And as I did, my hand shot out in a reflexive motion for the beer that wasn’t there. Hadn’t been there in years.
Not since the accident.
Habit, that was the hardest part of being sober. I missed the sweating tumbler of bourbon sitting next to me as I hacked into systems well into the night. The ice-cold beer drunk in triumph after an especially good run. The liquid courage I’d down right before sliding in next to a tourist chick who’d wandered into Reese’s Pub. It was all…routine.
And it had been for most of my life.
Alcohol was such a part of my life, it was basically a stage of development. Birth led to walking, walking led to talking, talking led to drinking.
By the age of five, I was fetching beers from the fridge, carefully carrying the bottles into the living room without dropping them on our wooden floors.
By the age of seven, I could mix a pretty good version of my mom's favorite drink, a dry martini with just a whiff of vermouth.
By the age of eight, I had mastered my Dad’s Rusty Nails, though I hated the smell.
By the age of eight-and-a-half, keeping their drinks topped off was my full-time job.
It took me until I was nine to understand that if I wanted my parents to remember something that I told them, I needed to make sure I said it before cocktail hour. Because once the tumblers and martini glasses were in hand, Cole and I were expected to disappear.
I tried to make my little brother understand that too, but Cole never seemed as affected by it as I was. And for that I was perversely grateful. It meant I was doing my job as big brother.
Our parents had parties almost every night, with friends we called Uncle and Aunt, but who never treated us as anything more than short bartenders. "Derek, go mix Mr. Wayne an Old-Fashioned. Cole, go put Mrs. Quinn’s purse on your bed." Sometimes our actual relatives would drive over from Crown Creek, and I’d be in charge of watching out for my little cousin Cooper too. I’d teach him the rhythm of their parties to keep him safe.
In the summer, we hid out heads under our pillows to drown out the noise of shouted laughter.
In the winter, we fell asleep in the pile of coats and boots that covered our beds.
The first hour, we could be visible, as long as we were helpful and happy.
The second hour, we hung in the doorway in case we were summoned.
By the third hour we stayed out of sight.
My body is marked and scarred, not by my parents in any literal way, but by their neglect. A broken arm, from falling out of an apple tree, that never healed right. A long thin line, where the oven door closed against my arm, that still gleams shiny white. A broken toe, never mentioned because I knew better than to bother them after five, that still aches like hell when it rains.
They didn’t hurt me. But they weren’t paying attention when I hurt myself. They were wrapped up in themselves, wrapped up in each other, and more than anything they were wrapped up in their drinking.
My brother and I got very used to spending all our time together but that did not last. When Cole started getting inducted into honor societies and invited to take college classes while still in high school, I peeled off from him and found my own group.
That group liked to party.
No one paid attention at my house, so my house was where we hung out. My parents' liquor cabinet was insanely well-stocked, and they drank down their supplies so quickly, that they didn’t notice it went more quickly than it should.
Those parties were my gateway into the wider world of high school, and a little alcohol was my social lubricant.
By fifteen, I drank every day.
By sixteen, I did shots before heading to school.
By seventeen, I carried a flask everywhere I went.
When I finally turned twenty-one it was almost anticlimactic. I’d been drinking heavily and daily for six years. I was bloated and tired, my mind stretched like a rubber band when I tried to think hard. There were holes in my memory, but I didn't care enough to worry about that.
Jesse and Nick, my best friends back then, weren't nearly as far gone as I was, but all three of us were headed in the same direction.
Until the accident.
I sat back in my chair and took a sip of water, one of the only liquids I allowed myself to drink these days. I had no idea why theses old thoughts were creeping up on me again. I rolled my chair over to the window and peeked out at the great house. It was her fault. She’d brought up my past, so, of course, I was thinking about it. And thinking about it always brought me back to that night.
The sideways slide on the icy road. Jesse’s anguished cry as the back started to fishtail. The sickening screech of metal on metal.
Guilt was a familiar companion. I lived with it every day. But I was pretty sure what I felt right now wasn’t the normal, usual guilt.
This guilt was new, and it started up the moment I saw the bruises on Aria’s side.
Just like parents with me, I hadn’t actually put those marks on her body.
But I had a nagging suspicion I was the reason they were there.
I tapped my fingers on my desk. Then picked up my phone.
“Yeah?” My brother Cole always answered me on the first ring. Like he was afraid if he took too long, I’d hang up. After eight years of not speaking more than twice a year, he still seemed surprised we were speaking at all.
The feeling was mutual. We couldn’t be more opposite. He was a driven people person whose life’s work revolved around closing deals and making connections. I was a deliberate hermit whose life’s work revolved around making sure no one connected me to my work.
But he was smart. And he knew Aria. And he’d been sober in high school, so his memory wasn’t punched through with blank spaces.
“What are you doing now?” I asked. Cole was always doing something. He had the same kind of restless energy I had, though he channeled it differently. His fiancee complained just being in the same room as us made her exhausted.
“Got a call at one,” Cole said, in that clipped, efficient tone he used when other people were in the room. People he wanted to impress.
“That’s ten minutes from now. You’ve got time to answer a question.”
“Depends on the question. You know me.”
“I do. You can take a full ten minutes to answer a yes or no question.”
“I’m charming that way. So what’s up?”
I tapped my fingers on my desk, half-wondering why I was staring out the window until I realized I was watching the great house. I spun my chair so my back was to the window. “You remember Aria, right?”
“Why? Wait… is she back?” The panic in Cole’s voice was understandable. “Derek, wait, is she there now?”
“She is.” I tried not to get aggravated with Cole’s concern. “She’s not kicking me out, Cole. I’m not going to be homeless…” I cleared my throat and looked down, “…again.”
“Are you sure?”
“Mr. Dolan’s will is clear. I inherited the carriage house. This is my home and I’d staying here.”
“But.” No matter where you were in a conversation, Cole was always two or three steps ahead. It was annoying. “She’s living there too now? Why?”
“No clue.”
“Doesn’t she have like, a penthouse in every major city? She’s a rockstar. She and her boyfriend are worth millions.”
I opened my mouth, then hesitated. I didn’t know anything other than what I’d found out by snooping, and every day that went by I felt less and less comfortable with what I knew. And what I’d done. “I think they’re over. She and her boyfriend, I mean. Not sure about the band.”
“Aw, Wrecked broke up? Damn, they rocked.”
“You’re a fan?” That surprised me. I’d been surprised a lot lately, and I didn’t like it. “Never mind, that’s besides the point. I’m calling to find out what you remember from high school. She was in your class, right?”
“She was, but she ran with a different crowd. The artsy kids. The drama-geeks and the band freaks. She was kind of in her own little world, but nice enough when you got her talking.”
“Wasn’t she pretty snobby though? Bitchy?” I was reaching, I knew it, but I needed to hate her so I could stop feeling this guilt. “She had to have been pretty terrible. I mean, she ran away and cut off all ties with her family - .”
“Yeah, and only terrible people do that,” Cole interrupted me. Every word was laced with heavy meaning.
“That’s different,” I protested. “You didn’t run away. You went to college.” I couldn’t believe I was defending my brother from himself. I’d spent years accusing him of the same thing I was now absolving. “I knew where you were.”
“And her parents knew where she was too. She had a publicist. A manager. If they wanted to see her, they could. She toured a lot. Hell, I went to see Wrecked at Manhattan Square Garden three different times.”
I opened my mouth and closed it, unsure what to say. I didn’t want to sympathize with Aria.
And why was that?
Why was I so set on believing she hadn’t changed?
Hadn’t I?
Cole cleared his throat. “Listen, Derek, I can call you later, okay? I can’t keep these guys waiting.”
“You can too, and I bet you will.”
I could hear Cole’s evil grin. “Okay, I can’t keep them waiting as long as I usually keep people waiting,” he amended. “Want me to swing by later?”
“No,” I barked immediately.
Cole took my sudden mood swing in stride. “Okay fine, weirdo. How about this weekend?”
“We should reschedule.” I didn’t want my brother and Aria crossing paths, because I knew that as soon as they started talking, gregarious Cole would have her smiling and laughing.
I didn’t want to see Aria smile. Because - terrible memory aside - I knew her smile was beautiful and would make her harder to hate.
And I needed to keep hating her. In the months since Mr. Dolan asked me to find her, I’d justified everything I’d done by telling myself Aria deserved the bad things that had happened to her. And if I was wrong…
If she didn’t deserve them…
And if I’d somehow hurt an innocent person with my warped sense of justice, with a bad decision made in a moment of poor judgment…
Then maybe I hadn’t changed at all.