Page 209 of Filthy Lies


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The melody always tore at me. The words snuck inside and did damage to the thing in my chest that some would call a heart, but I didn’t know what to make of it. It hadn’t done much else apart from send blood around my arteries before Kat and Conor.

Now, it did other things too.

Odd things.

It beat funny when he was near, and I could hear it pounding in my ears if he was kissing me.

That was, I reasoned, how I knew that it belonged to him—because he made it behave out of character.

“You can’t send this song to me and then disappear,” he grumbled.

I gnawed on the inside of my cheek rather than answer.

His phone clattered as it dropped against the nightstand, and then the duvet was being lifted and my pillows were being rearranged so that he could be inside the fort I’d made. When his heat spread all the way down my back, I sighed as it surged into the many cold spots that infected me like a disease.

With one arm around my waist and his chin on my shoulder, we listened until the song finished.

“I never imagined you’d like The Beach Boys,” he mumbled in my ear.

“Some of their tracks are nice. They used to…” I cleared my throat. “Some of their songs were my mom’s favorite. Which I always found hilarious seeing as her husband was Gerry Sullivan.

“But, I guess, who the hell knew what she truly liked? Everything could have been an act.”

“You’re right,” he said softly. “It could have been an act. Maybe a lot of it was. But I can’t see all of it being one. Tell me about the last birthday you spent together.”

I knew what he was doing. Humanizing a double agent. Still… “She sneaked me away from our guards and we headed to Chuck E. Cheese.”

He laughed. “Really?”

“Yeah.” I twisted over so I could peer at him through the dim lights. “We stuck around for about twenty minutes, grabbed the food, and left.”

“You didn’t do the whole kids’ party thing?”

My nose crinkled. “I was a teenager. I didn’t want Chuck E. Cheese.”

“So why did she take you there?”

“Because I’d had a tantrum about how being Gerry Sullivan’s daughter was ruining my life and that I never got to do anything normal.”

“And that was her reaction?”

“Yeah. Then she took me to Target and we headed into Bed, Bath and Beyond afterward, and…” My smile was shaky. “I guess she just made us do normal stuff. I never imagined that that wouldn’t have been normal for her. She fit in seamlessly, Conor. You’d never think she was Russian.”

“Her job was literally to fit in, but it wasn’t her job to be a good mom. Was she, Star? Was she a good mom?”

I wanted to say no but I couldn’t. “She loved me.”

Conor seemed to recognize that by saying those three words, I was admitting that she had been a good mother.

Fuck, she’d been the best.

For no other reason would I have gotten myself entangled with this bullshit if not to find the reason she’d been snatched from me too soon.

He reached for my hand and gently squeezed my fingers. “And your dad?”

“He was different when Mom was alive. Back then, he was a good dad. They did what they could when we were growing up in the goldfish bowl that’s life on tour and in the spotlight.

“After, he was lost. I knew he loved me, but he stopped being a ‘recovering’ addict and fell back into bad habits. I was too much to handle, so broken and lost, just as much as he was, and instead of us coming together, it pushed us apart.”

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