“Why? Because you broke your goddamn promise, Maisy!”
There’s so much anger bleeding out of him, I expect the red stain to be all over my dress and shoes when I return to the light.
His voice grows hoarse and gravelly. “You know that! Stop acting like you don’t!”
“What?” I sputter, caught off guard as confusion swarms me. “What are you talking about?”
“You promised me. You swore not to tell Holden or your parents when I showed you what was in the garage.”
Fox breathes heavily, digging his fingers into my upper arms. The brick bites into my back through the thin designer dress. I ignore all of it, because what he said triggered my memories. It’s all coming back in a visceral rush that threatens to swallow me whole.
“The day you gave me the daisy,” I whisper, my eyes widening.
There’s something else I want to show you. It’s in my dad’s garage. The image of Fox at nine floats to the surface of my mind as we stood in the field by our tree. I wasn’t supposed to find it. You have to promise not to tell anyone.
I remember that day now. I haven’t thought about it in so long because it was too clo
se to when I lost Fox.
He took me into the garage and I thought he was going to show me something to do with the mechanics he was learning from his dad. But I was wrong.
His excitement was infectious, and I loved following him into trouble. It gave me a thrill like no other. He never told me I couldn’t do something because I was small or a girl. He liked it when I came along on our adventures.
Everything looked normal at first. Fox jogged over to his dad’s motorcycle and ran a proud hand over it. “I’m going to take you for a ride on this once I’m allowed to drive it.”
I nodded eagerly. I wanted to feel the wind in my hair while I got to hug him really tight.
Then he took my hand and led me to the other side of the garage where his dad usually kept a stash of his favorite beer in a mini fridge. We opened the door and instead of beer bottles, there were trays of small tubes with labels on them. As far as I knew, our parents weren’t allowed to bring their work home from their lab.
“A science experiment?” I asked.
He shook his head and carefully prodded one of the tubes. “I think it’s this.” He let the door to the refrigerator shut and moved a box of tools out of the way on the workbench, pulling out the folder hidden there. “It says it’s a patent.”
“Synthetic opioid formula trial,” I read aloud on one of the section headings. The page had a scientific diagram on it. I couldn’t pronounce some of the longer technical words, even though I read a lot for my age. “How come they have it here? Why is it hidden?”
“Dunno. Cool, right? We never get to see their work. They always say I’m not allowed to visit when I beg them to bring me to their lab for take your kid to work day.”
We only spent a few minutes marveling at Fox’s discovery of his parents contraband drug trial stash. I remember one of the pages in the packet having a long list of numbers that I wrote off at the time, but now that I’m thinking about it, I remember dollar signs and lots of commas. Whatever they had been hiding in the garage was worth a huge amount of money to the company.
“I-I did promise.” And I did break it. “I’m so sorry.”
The echo of guilt flares as fresh as it was when the words slipped out of my mouth in my excitement to tell my parents about my new favorite day at bedtime. Once they tumbled out, I couldn’t steal them back.
The memory of the weird, tense look they exchanged makes my breath catch. They told me not to tell anyone else what I saw. To forget it even happened. It was the first time Mom ever became controlling with me, but we’re so far down the path now that I’d pushed the memory far behind all the other bad blood between me and Mom. The expression on her face scared me that night.
Grabbing onto his biceps, I will him to hear out my explanation. “Wait—I did tell my parents when I said I wouldn’t, but they already knew.” I felt really bad about it, but our parents were close friends and it made sense that they knew, because Mom worked with them. “They didn’t seem surprised by what we saw in the garage.”
He’s angry all over again. It rolls off of him, nearly suffocating me. I sense he’s ready to shove me back out behind the iron walls he built around his heart once more. How could I have forgotten about that day?
“You picked them over the promise you made me.”
“I was too excited to tell them about my day. It wasn’t on purpose, it just slipped out.”
“The secret of what they were hiding got them killed,” Fox grits out through clenched teeth. I can feel the vibration of his deep voice through his chest against mine. “Their car crash wasn’t an accident. They were murdered along with my baby sister.”
Another wave of shock crashes over me. I’m on the verge of shattering, stuck between the old memories and the truth coming out.
“Sister?” It comes out strangled.