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“Don’t worry about it,” Cleve said. “I’m handling this.”
“Handling this? What the hell did you do?” She slapped his arm. Then she slapped him again, this time on the back. “What the hell stupid kind of thing did you do?”
“He tried to kill us,” Auggie said. “He would have killed our daughter. Him and his friends.”
“No,” Cleve said.
But Tiera moaned. She hit him again, harder this time, and Cleve twisted to get away. The movement carried him a step, and then another, until he formed the third point of a triangle: Theo and Auggie at one corner, Tiera at the other, and Cleve like a paper target at the end of a long lane.
Thoughts stormed across Theo’s face. Then he looked at Auggie, the glance long enough and solid enough to send a charge through him, like someone had run through a room flipping every switch, all the lights blazing.
“What the hell are they talking about?” Tiera said. “We talked about this. You and I talked about this. We weren’t bailing her out anymore. No more rushing out to fix her problems.”
“What happened?” Theo asked. “What happened on Saturday night?”
“We agreed we weren’t going to enable her bad behavior!”
“Will you shut up?” The shout started small and then grew into a roar. “Shut up! Shut the fuck up! I did this for you; don’t you fucking get that?”
Tiera drew back as though he’d struck her.
“What did you do?” Theo asked.
“She’d had way too much to drink. She texted me to pick her up, and I wasn’t going to say no—what was I supposed to do? Tell her to drive home wasted, hit a telephone pole? Enable her bad behavior? How stupid are you? We were responsible for her!”
Tiera held herself rigid. Her face looked like a wax mask.
“That night,” Auggie said. “You went out there. And something went wrong, didn’t it? What went wrong?”
Cleve stared at him, but it was like he was looking through Auggie. Then a laugh jolted through him. “You think I did something to her?”
“I think you cared about Shaniyah,” Theo said. “But something bad happened.”
“I wouldn’t have hurt her. I never would have hurt her. Hell, I spent half my time making sure nothing bad happened to her, and the other half I spent putting out fires between the two of them.” He nodded at Tiera. “From the minute she set foot in this house, they were going at it. You know what that’s like? You know what it’s like, going from this nice, peaceful life with the woman you love to—to World War Three? They couldn’t walk through the room without going after each other. I just wanted it to be like it used to be.” He seemed dazed, as though even he weren’t sure of what he was saying. “I just wanted some peace and quiet.”
“And Shaniyah was the problem,” Theo said.
“What did you do?” Tiera asked stiffly. “What stupid thing did you go and do?”
“I didn’t do anything!” Cleve’s gaze seemed to sharpen, as though he were taking them all in again, and he stepped back once. “I wouldn’t have hurt her! And I wouldn’t have hurt you either.” But that last part came out a little weaker than the rest of it, and Auggie remembered the baseball bat, the pipe, the knife spinning so fast the steel seemed to bend. “We wanted to scare you, that’s all. You called here, you were asking too many questions. You were supposed to stop.”
With what looked like an effort, Tiera pushed herself upright. The shakiness of her voice had gotten worse, and she leaned on the sofa, steadying herself with one hand. “Did you kill that little girl?”
The wound in Cleve’s face went down to the bone. All he said, in a disbelieving whisper, was “Ti.”
“What did you do? Tell me what you did!”
He shook his head once, blinking as tears welled up. Voice thick, he said, “She was—” He stopped. “She was dead. Already. When I got there. She had tape over her mouth. She’d tried to throw up, but the tape—” He stopped. Tears spilled down his cheeks, and he wiped them away. “There was nothing I could do. I sat there with her. I knew she was dead. I knew there wasn’t anything anybody could do for her; she was already starting to get cold. And that party was still going, people everywhere, drunk and laughing and music blasting. It was like hell.”
“Did you call emergency services?” Theo asked.
The pause lasted a long time. Longer than Auggie thought possible, until it felt like the air had drawn too tight it would snap. Then Cleve shook his head.
“You stupid man,” Tiera said.
“She was already dead!” But that shout seemed to be the last thing he had left, because his voice collapsed, and his shoulders curled inward. “There was nothing anybody could do for her. And I knew if I called, I knew it would start trouble, and I just—I just wanted it to go away. I just didn’t want to deal with it. We’ve dealt with so much. She was gone, and it broke my heart, but now it was just us again, and we could go back to being us.”
He held out a hand to Tiera, and she stared at it from out of the wax mask of her face. When she spoke, the word was a strangled whisper. “You didn’t want to deal with it?”
