Page 35 of The Quiet After The Fall

“Mom, stop!”

I reach out, grabbing a fist full of pills that fall through the cracks in my fingers.

Click. Click. Click. It isn’t the pills. It’s the chain lift. We’re strapped into the car again, Sawyer’s beside me, and the rattle keeps going in the distance.

My father’s in the car ahead of us, so is Helen Thorne. He lifts a champagne flute to her, smiling, and it’s so fucking unnatural to see a smile on his face, my stomach roils. They don’t notice us, they’re too busy staring at each other.

The ride operator leans over, his baseball cap red and white with the Wonder World logo. He tugs the bar across Sawyer’s lap and gives a thumbs-up. Our eyes meet. It’s Moretti and he’s grinning wide. His eyes are the spiral swirls of Giggles the Clown.

“Let her off.” My voice doesn’t belong to me. It’s an unearthly pleading. “She’s not part of this.”

He smiles. “She won’t be a problem.”

Click. Click. Click.

We climb the tracks and the park shrinks—the lake, the lot, the highway. Her hand finds mine and I finally look at her, opening my mouth to give her the sentence the ride stole the first time.

“Whatever happens with Owen, I need you to know⁠—”

We reach the top of the world. The words sit in the back of my throat as we hang there. “I love you.”

Then the rails aren’t under us, the tracks severing with a crack. Owen’s two rows back and his eyes find mine, and there’s the sound he made, the wail, and the car goes over the edge into nothing, and Moretti’s voice is the loudest of all.

“You don’t want to see what happens to people who don’t hold up their end.”

I wake with my heart slamming, the sheets soaked through.

Sunlight streams through the curtains and I realize I’m alone. Ella’s gone who knows where. Good. She’d only try to talk to me, to see what’s wrong.

I lie there in the silence, shutting my eyes and willing the awful images from the dream to dissipate until my pulse returns to normal and my breathing slows.

Reaching for my phone, I pull up my text thread with Sawyer, rereading our messages from last night.

I lost her to my own stubbornness, then to Owen, and almost for good on Velocity.

I’m not afraid of Moretti.

I’m afraid of how far I’ll go to keep Sawyer, and of who I’ll be when I’m done.

Aldrich Development is dead this early in the morning, which is the only reason I’m here. My father hasn’t come in before ten in years, and since the accident, he’s barely been in at all. I’m banking on today being no different.

It’s not a large building, just a warehouse filled with parts and a couple closed off offices inside. We share the building with a guy who does car windshield replacements, and the smell of industrial glue permeates the walls. Before the scandal, we had an entire building in the heart of Ashford. Double the admin staff. Now it’s a ghost town.

My father has the largest office, but the room’s a mess. Old paperwork in piles. Garbage can perpetually full. Dust covering every surface. I guess that’s what happens when you can’t afford to pay the cleaning staff anymore.

I take a seat in his creaky leather chair, moving unopened mail and adjusting his laptop so it’s closer to the edge of the desk.

It wakes when I open it, the password prompt front and center. I sigh and type it in. KnoxandOwen. Like a password will win him father of the year. Such a fucking joke.

There’s no time to sit on all that bullshit.

I’m here this morning for more than confirming payroll and answering emails. There’s got to be something in here that explains why he’d make a deal with Moretti. Why he’s so afraid. I need the details Moretti mentioned…whatever he has on our family.

It’s laughable how terrible my father is when it comes to technology. He’s never been patient enough to listen to me about how lax his system is. His loss is my gain.

I go through his folders, quickly scanning, looking for the thing that doesn’t belong. Most of it’s nothing. Shit I’ve seen before. Tax filings. Vendor contracts. Purchase orders. Christ, he’s unorganized.

Closing those out, I drag the mouse over a folder with no name.