Page 3 of A Matter of Time

“Okay.” I yawned before letting out a deep sigh. That exchange had maybe killed a second and a half. What was next on the agenda?

“Tell me about yourself, Mr. Keyes.”

I looked back at him. “Whaddya wanna know?”

“Where are you from?”

“Kentucky,” I said flatly, because I usually said LA or Miami just to make it sound more glamorous, but I figured he was looking for the truth, being a police officer and all.

“How long have you been in Chicago?”

“I moved here when I was seventeen.”

“You run away from home?”

“Nope. I graduated from high school when I was seventeen. See, my birthday’s in January, so I started school at four instead of⁠—”

“Can we move on?”

Rude much?

“Well?” he barked at me.

“Rude much?” I said it out loud that time instead of just thinking it in my head.

“Sorry. Go on.”

“Never mind,” I snapped at him. I hated getting caught rambling on to people who didn’t give a crap. It was mortifying.

“Just talk already. Sorry for interrupting.”

He wasn’t sorry one bit, but I figured if I was waiting for actual sincerity, I’d be waiting for the Rapture. I was better off just letting it go. What did it matter to me whether he cared or didn’t?

“Okay, so I got here and got a job, and I’ve been here ever since.”

“Uh-huh. So, what, your family’s still there in Kentucky?”

“No,” I breathed out. “There was only my grandmother, and she died when I was ten.”

“Where are your folks?”

“I have no idea.”

“You have no idea where your father is?”

He said it like he didn’t believe it.

“No. I don’t even know who he is. It doesn’t even say on my birth certificate, and my mother left when I was, like, three months old or something. Her name was—is Mandy, but that’s all I can tell you. She never came back, so I’ve never met her.”

“I see. So you were raised by your grandmother, and when she died, what?”

“I went into foster care.”

He looked straight at me. “Any horror stories?”

“No. I was lucky. I lived in a group home from the time I was ten to the time I graduated from high school.”

“You close to any of those people?”