Quiet in Her Bones by Singh, Nalini (mobi reader .txt) 📕

send him invoices for clothing and jewelry. Things that made her look good on his arm. She’d also had a credit card for lunches out with the girls, that type of thing.

The bills had gone to my father, so he could question her on any unusual purchases.

So the money she’d sent to her parents and the money she’d put in my account? She’d gathered that by buying designer items from the boutiques, then waiting a bit before reselling them online.

My father had kept my mother on a financial leash. I’d always thought her plan was to save enough to be able to take him on in court, but then she’d vanished and all he’d lost was half the value of the house.

I sent an email to the funeral director with a zipped file of photos.

Job done. Normalcy achieved.

Almost able to feel my mother’s breath on my nape, I got out of the chair and made my way downstairs, the crutches thudding on every step. I made it to my car without running into anyone ­else—­Mia had long since returned to her home, and Pari was probably doing homework in her room.

The notebook in my back pocket was digging into my butt, so I took it out and threw it in the glove box. I was driving past the café when I spotted Lily closing up. The sight threw some switch in the back of my mind, disgorging the fact that tonight was one of the few nights when she wasn’t open. She must’ve stayed late to do paperwork or a stocktake.

Stopping the car, I rolled down the window. “Want to come for a ride?”

She gave me a ­narrow-­eyed look, glanced down at the brown paper bag in her hand, then shrugged. “Yes, okay.”

She brought with her the smell of sugar and coffee. “Leftover pastries,” she said, stretching around to put the bag in the backseat before shrugging out of her black fleece. “Where are we going?”

I hadn’t thought about it. “The Huia Lookout?” It’d be empty at this time, especially with the winds having begun to swirl.

“Sure.” She settled back, trim and neat in her black uniform.

We didn’t speak the entire drive to the lookout, and darkness had begun to fall by the time we arrived, but it wasn’t ­pitch-­dark yet, the world caught between night and day. There were no other cars in the small parking area surrounded by green, the picnic table empty.

Walking together through the wind, we found our way to the lookout itself. The land fell away in a dizzying drop around us, the mountains in the distance huge goliaths and the water out front as dark as the horizon.

Below, the tops of the barely visible tree ferns looked deceptively welcoming and soft.

Fall from this height and nothing would stop your descent as you tumbled screaming through the ferns and the trees. Perhaps the splintered branches would eventually hook into your clothes or limbs, your body a broken doll hanging in the air, but you wouldn’t be alive to appreciate the bloody artistry of it.

“I could kill someone here.”

Lily jerked and took a step back.

“In fiction.” I grinned. “Sorry, hazard of a writer’s brain.”

Dark eyes scanned my face, before Lily’s lips twitched. “You always were a bit weird. I was cleaning your room once and I found this exercise book full of notes about forensics and how to hide bodies.”

“Research is important.”

Lily rubbed her hands up and down her arms, her gaze out toward the darkening waves of the Tasman Sea. “God, it’s breathtaking, isn’t it? Out here, you can forget that a whole city lives and breathes less than an hour away.”

Turning away from her view and to the right, I could see the lights of a few houses, but they were scattered stars against the darkness. You could imagine this as some ancient cove, peopled only by isolated fisherman. “Do you ever wonder how many people lie dead in the bush? People no one’s ever found?”

I’d watched a few episodes of a ­psychic-­detective reality TV show once, and the psychics kept leading the crews into the bush, certain the victim lay buried in the voracious green. They’d never actually located a body, but in one case, the psychic had dug and dug, certain of their instinct. I’d found that the most realistic aspect of the ­show—­if I had to bury a body, I’d do it in the bush, where my victim’s bones would lie undisturbed for a lifetime and more.

Lily put a hand on my upper arm. “I’m so sorry, Aarav.” Gentle words. “Whatever else she was, Nina was a good mum. I remember all those times she’d come home from her ladies’ lunches with a carryout bag of your favorite snack, and how she’d always pick you up from school. She didn’t deserve this.”

For the first time since my mother’s remains had been discovered, my eyes threatened to turn hot. Staring out into the wind, I swallowed hard. My instinct was to strike out, hurt Lily for daring to see under my skin, but the words wouldn’t come. Turning, I walked back toward the car. The wind was gathering now, and I had to pay attention not to get blown over on the damn crutches.

Once inside the car, I grabbed the bag of pastries and took a cream doughnut. Lily removed an éclair, and we sat there eating fat and sugar as total darkness cloaked the world outside. In the bush below the lookout would exist an even darker night, ­pitch-­black and impenetrable. My mother had breathed her last breaths in lonely darkness so complete there could be no hope.

“Where did you get the money for the café?” I shifted to look at her. “Just tell me. It’s fucking with my head and I’d like to have at least one person I know I can trust.”

She stared at me, a hardness in her eyes that was nothing like what I’d previously glimpsed. “You’re so privileged, Aarav. Do you have any awareness of that?”