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

I hadn’t? No, I hadn’t.

My gut grew heavy under a nauseating weight of sensory memory: of vodka, of vomit, of my own body odor.

“Fuck, mate, you can’t do this shit.” Kahu, dragging me off the couch and throwing me into the shower. He’d put together an omelet out of the few ingredients he could find in my fridge, made me eat it.

Then he’d sat there, looked me in the eye, and said, “I don’t have any other real friends, you a-­hole. You’re whānau to me at this point. I can’t lose you. So we sit here until you stop shaking and wanting more of that poison, and then we get you into rehab, therapy, whatever the fuck it takes.”

Kahu had saved me. Then I’d gone and stolen his girl. No wonder he’d been pissed.

“She left you without warning,” Dr. Jitrnicka verbalized, as if that wasn’t obvious. “Though according to media reports, she did pen a suicide note.”

I couldn’t remember the note, but if the police had given it back to me, I’d have kept it. It’d be in my safe. “Is that why I had a random woman in my car the night I crashed?”

“You know she was only the latest in a long line since Paige’s death.” He tapped his pen lightly against his notes. “That’s why I’m so concerned about the discovery of your mother’s remains and its emotional impact. It’s a case of trauma upon trauma.”

No wonder my mind was a fractured mess.

I finally sat down, my left leg incredibly heavy. “Paige ­was … kind. She tried to look after me, tried to help me. Obviously, I screwed up and didn’t do the same for her.”

“You know nothing is ever that simple. I never knew Paige, but it appears she had her own demons to battle.”

That ghostly bottle of kombucha left untouched, as she’d so often left her food untouched. The sounds I’d regularly heard coming from the bathroom. The way she’d refused to look at images of herself when it was her business to be in those images.

The small bundle, complete with syringe, that I’d discovered after her death.

Outward manifestations of an inner agony that had made her whimper in her sleep.

I’d disposed of the bundle and syringe without sharing the find with the police, not wanting the tabloids to use the information to smear her memory. Even angry with her, I hadn’t hurt ­her … because I’d loved her.

“I wish she’d made a different choice that day,” I said, and for a moment, I didn’t know to which day I was referring.

The day I lost my mother or the day I lost Paige.

47

The first thing I did after the appointment was go to my apartment and open the safe inside my study. I’d hidden the note at the very bottom of the pile of things I had in there; it was still inside a police evidence bag.

Unsealing it, I pulled out a piece of floral notepaper.

I’d bought her that paper after figuring out that my sophisticated model girlfriend loved all things girly and sweet and soft. She’d sprayed each sheet with her perfume before she wrote on it.

It lingered, a musty, decaying taste on my tongue.

Hey Aarav,

Sorry about this. I just can’t do it anymore. Everything hurts.

Don’t add this to the guilt you carry about your mother’s disappearance. You could do nothing then and you can’t do anything now. This is my choice and I’m deliberately making it while you’re away at your book festival, so you’ll know this wasn’t a cry for help. I don’t want to be saved. I’m ready to go.

But I hope for better for you. I hope you find peace.

Love always,

Paige

Her words echoed again and again inside my head as I sat on Piha Beach an hour and a half later. Paige had loved Piha’s black sands, the crashing ocean a siren song she could never ignore.

“Let’s buy a place above Piha.” Her green eyes clear and bright and her short hair sticking up every which way as she turned to look at me in bed. “With a big balcony so I can sit there and listen to the ocean.”

She’d jumped three days later.

And in the waves now danced two ghosts.

I didn’t know how long I watched them laugh and spin and call out to me, but the sun had long dropped from its highest point by the time I went back to my car and restarted the engine.

I’d parked on a grassy verge, cars spread out sporadically along the long stretch of ocean. Three surfers, sleek as seals in their wetsuits, were loading their surfboards onto the vehicle closest to me, their hair still wet and their laughs holding that delighted edge that only comes with a rush of ­endorphins—­or adrenaline.

I hadn’t laughed that way since I was a child.

Putting the car into reverse gear, I pulled out, then headed toward my father’s home, my head a mess. Paige was dead. I’d hallucinated her.

The thought was a reminder to write down anything of which I was certain before the knowledge got confused and broken. After pulling over near a closed track into the regional park, I took out my notebook and read over all my notes prior to today.

My pulse began to calm the further I got into the book. I remembered all of this, though a few of the memories were admittedly fuzzy at the edges.

Then I hit something about two pages from the end. The writing was jagged, as if done in a great rush. It said:

Dad’s secretary. In the Cul-­de-­Sac that night. Wanted to be next Mrs. Rai.

My breath came in jerky bursts. I had no memory of making that entry on the bottom half of the page.

Could someone else have gained access to my notebook?

Yes, but it wasn’t a reasonable possibility. The most logical explanation was that I’d scrawled the note while my brain was acting up. The question was, were the words true? All these years and