Page 266 of John + Siena: The Complete Duet

John didn’t look up from the things he had spread out on his bed. “You said you were coming over. I left it open for you when I got home.”

“You couldn’t call me back? Send a text?”

“No.”

That was all he offered.

No.

Siena could see in the way John’s gaze narrowed as he fingered the edge of a piece of paper that something was weighing on him. On his mind, likely. Maybe it was the slope of his shoulders, too, or how he wouldn’t look at her.

She came a little closer.

“What’s all this?”

It looked as though he had dumped out a bubble mailer if the empty package tossed to the pillow was any indication.

“My latest surprise,” he said dryly.

“What?”

John looked up from the stuff on the bed.

Pain stared back at her.

“I keep getting these—this shit,” he said, waving at the papers on the bed. “It’s like they want to remind me how easy it is to dredge shit up from my past. It feels like they’re telling me they can put my life and business on display. I don’t know how they keep finding this shit, Siena.”

She grabbed a document on the bed, and looked it over.

A police report, it seemed.

A sixteen year old Johnathan Marcello had stolen a neighbor’s car, and crashed it on the interstate. He tested positive for two different kinds of drugs, and had a blood alcohol level slightly over the limit.

Holy shit.

Siena understood that this event that had been documented in John’s life—when he was younger, of course—was shortly before the time his bipolar disorder had finally been properly diagnosed. It was likely one of the many manic episodes that had led up to the final diagnosis.

“This accident was brushed under the rug,” John said, taking the paper from Siena. “Or it was supposed to be. My family paid people off—got serious about trying to figure out what in the hell was going on with me, then.”

“What happened to the case and file?”

John shrugged. “Should have been destroyed. Some went on record—few hours of probation, some fines. I once spent sixty days in a juvenile detention center for other shit. Of course, none of them ever actually had my disorder on record. That was all before I got diagnosed, and then even after, we were careful about keeping it off record when shit went down.”

He gestured behind him to other opened bubble mailers on the floor.

“What is this?”

“Me,” John said. “Me and bipolar.”

Siena blinked, and then looked at John. “Someone is sending you these?”

He nodded. “Every day, usually. I come home, and one is on my doorstep. I come out of a place, and one is stuffed under the wiper of my car. I’m not the only one to get a package, either. Some of my people—my family, too. Associates of mine.”

“John—”

“It makes people look at me differently, and that irritates me like nothing fucking else. Like I might blow up, or freak out. They don’t trust me, or something.”

“Or is that just how it makes you feel to have other people know,” she said.