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He blows out a breath, fingers tightening around the wheel as he nods. I’m not surprised. Dad might not play an active role on the board, but he’s a big donor. Of course he’d hear about this before I did.
“Were you gonna tell me?”
He cuts me a sideways look. “I was hoping I could somehow avoid that altogether.”
Ah. “I take it his new daddy wasn’t having it.”
He scowls. “I got the impression he didn’t have much say in the matter. The boy starts school Monday.”
“Then who…” My words trail off as it clicks. That short redhead. His supposed caseworker, if that sophomore kid is to be believed.
“His wife’s apparently very fond of Aston. Has worked with him for years and is certain he’s stable enough.”
“Stable… enough…” I reiterate slowly. “So he’s not fucking stable?”
At Dad’s pointed look, I wave him off. Right, we already covered that. This isn’t news. Not to us.
Not to those who saw what he did first-hand, whether it be through crime scene photos plastered across a projector in a courtroom…
Or experienced it in its technicolor, high-def, real-time glory.
Hell, I not only watched as my twelve-year-old foster brother blindly stabbed a grown man over and over and over again, until you couldn’t see any skin left…
I wore the damn evidence of his sickness.
I was covered in it.
Carried the stains of it in my nail beds for days. The mental scars even longer.
There’s no doubt in my mind that Rick deserved it, but where does the line get drawn?
Glancing down at my palm, I run my thumb over the faint, jagged line running just over the meat of my thumb. My eyes flick to the little slashes of discoloration down the insides of my fingers, just under the middle knuckles.
“Nothing screams stable quite like pulverizing a man well beyond his last breath,” I mumble, stroking the scar.
Dad inhales sharply. “What was that?”
“Nothing.” I close my hand into a fist and stare straight ahead. “So you think he might not even remember me?”
A pause. I hear him shift in his seat, the leather squeaking. “I didn’t say that.”
“But it’s possible.” Not a question.
He swallows with a loud click, but in my periphery, I see him give a short nod. “Walter said he’d ask his wife about it when Aston isn’t around, but from what I managed to drag out of him, Aston repressed a lot. He apparently…” I sense more than see him cut a glance my way. “Blacks out. When he has an…episode. And then goes on like nothing happened once the dust settles.”
Blinking a couple times, I process what he’s saying.
Inhaling deeply, I stretch my legs out as best I can and tip my head back against the headrest. Lifting a shoulder, I keep my gaze trained forward as I say, “So he didn’t come find me. He’s not here for me.”
“No. Definitely not. It’s just a really poorly-timed coincidence that he ended up here of all places. Walter was…shocked. Definitely caught off guard when I confronted him and brought up what happened back then. One of the reasons they decided he could try school here is because they figured no one would know of him or his story.”
“There’s already rumors. The gossip mongers like to talk. Probably should've never even mentioned the juvie thing. What were they thinking?”
Minor or not at the time, the internet hides nothing if you know what to look for.
My phone goes off with a message alert, silencing whatever Dad was about to say. I slide it out of my gym shorts pocket and give the lock screen a cursory glance before it fades to black once more.
“Seth?”
