Page 65 of The Five Year Lie

It’s her mother’s voice, and Ariel groans. She opens the door and yells. “Give me two minutes, Mom.”

“Bring out the sparklers!” is the response.

Ariel closes the door and glares up at Drew. “I guess you’re not getting a tour of my old bedroom.”

“Shame,” he says, kissing her neck. “I’d like to witness your embarrassing taste in music posters.”

“Oh, I hadexcellenttaste as a teenager. The Cranberries. Sisters of Mercy. I dyed my hair black specifically to piss off my dad. And I was very good at sneaking out after curfew.”

“You? No way.” He laughs, because that is so easy to picture. “How’d you get back in? Your dad literallyinventeda thing that stops girls from doing that anymore.”

“Uncle Ray invented it,” she corrects. “My dad just made himself rich on it. Besides, the older models weren’t as wide-angled. If I climbed onto the front porch from the side, I could usually avoid the camera.” She glances toward the bathroom door. “Give me a two-minute head start?”

“Oh, at least. I’m not coming out of the bathroom with the boss’s daughter.”

Ariel snickers. “Seriously, we’re done here. I can’t take much more of this, and you need to get off your feet. I’ll buy a tub of ice cream and bring it to your place. We’ll put on a movie and then ignore it.”

“Sounds like a plan.” He kisses her forehead one more time. “Go on, before somebody comes.”

When she goes, he misses her immediately. He’s left staring at his tired face in the ornate mirror, wondering what the hell he’s doing with his life. This party perfectly illustrates the problem—he came to Portland for justice and ended up stuffed with lobster rolls and having an affair with the boss’s daughter.

And he isn’t nearly as sorry as he should be. Two hours from now he’ll be holding her in bed, spent, the oscillating fan the only sound in his room. He’ll stroke her hair until she falls asleep, wishing the moment could last forever.

That’s when the guilt will settle in. Ernie raised him to make a difference, and it’s not going according to plan. He hasn’t exposed Chime Co. for what it’s done. And all he craves are small comforts, like Ariel’s arms wrapped around him at the end of the day. The sound of her laughter when they watch a movie on his laptop.

But the clock is ticking.

He waits a couple of crucial minutes before emerging from the bathroom. There isn’t anyone in the hallway, thankfully. Mindful of the thick, prosthetic-snagging carpet, he leans heavily on the banister all the way down the stairs. When he gets to the bottom, though, the terrain is unfamiliar. He’s come down a different staircase from the one he went up.

Mansions, though. Must be nice.

He’s arrived in a corridor with three doors to choose from. Two of them are shut—probably to discourage people from wandering the house. The third leads down a narrow hallway toward the kitchen. But the caterers have blocked it off with a deep, three-tiered cart where they’re stacking dirty dishes.

Drew is not about to climb those stairs again. But there are still two means of egress. One of the doors is ajar, so he pokes it with his fingertip. The door is heavier than he’d anticipated, and it barely swings an inch into some kind of parlor.

But he’s instantly relieved he didn’t push it open farther. There are two people standing together in that room, and they’re kissing, much like he and Ariel were doing only minutes earlier.

Except those two people are Ray Cafferty and Ariel’s mother.

He’s so startled, he doesn’t move a muscle for a long moment. And then, gathering his wits, he takes a slow step backward.

Seriously? The Cafferty family is even more fucked up than he’d thought.

“Mom?” Ariel’s voice calls out from somewhere at the other end of the house. “Where’d you go?”

Her mother answers a beat later. “Just a second!” And then there’s a frantic, whispered conversation in the parlor.

Shit.

Drew backs up toward the third door and turns the knob. The door swings silently open into an elegant home office with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and a big walnut desk.

It will have to do. Any second now, Ray is going to come out of that parlor and catch him standing here like an eavesdropper. So Drew goes into the home office and sits down in the only chair—which happens to be at Edward’s desk.

It’s another untenable situation, of course. If anyone sees him sitting here, he’ll look exactly like the snoop he really is. Unless...

He hastily yanks his trouser leg up and over his prosthetic. Then he leans forward, digging his fingers into the tired flesh of his stump. Massaging his leg through the barrier of the liner isn’t very effective. But Ray won’t know that.

And sure enough, Ariel’s uncle appears in the doorway seconds later. He does a literal double take when he glimpses Drew in the chair. His eyes widen comically, and he sputters. “Jesus, are you okay?”