Page 14 of What He Doesn't Know

But not before I threw one last rager in the empty house.

“Glow in the dark spray paint, Tadpole. You wouldn’t have seen it unless you were in that bedroom when the lights turned out. And I know for a fact you were not.”

She eyed me, blowing on her coffee that was spiked with a little Baileys. “You stayed the night? I thought everyone left after the party.”

I swallowed. “Yeah, I wasn’t ready to say goodbye yet I guess. Slept in my old sleeping bag on the floor.”

Charlie was quiet for a moment, so I took a sip of the scotch her dad had poured me after dinner. I knew coming to dinner with her parents would leave me with a full stomach and great conversation with people who felt like home, but what I didn’t expect was to see Charlie start to finally open up a little. She seemed to relax the more we talked, and though it was faint, I found a small piece of the old her shining through.

Charlie chuckled. “I’m just picturing whoever it was who bought that house, laying down in that room to go to bed the first night and being scared out of their minds.” She shook her head, looking up at me then, the moon casting a blue glow on her cheeks. “What did you write?”

I smirked. “Don’t look under the bed.”

Charlie’s little mouth popped open in anobefore she shook her head again. “You’re bad, Reese Walker,” she said, voice airy and light. And then, she hiccuped.

I liked seeing her like that — light and carefree, smiling and laughing. It reminded me of the goofy, shy bookworm that used to sleep over. She was the polar opposite of my sister Mallory — hell, she was different than any of the girls I’d ever met, honestly. She always had a quiet, mysterious quality about her, like you never could be sure what she was really thinking. And when she did open up to you, when you got to see the part of her that no one else did, it was something you’d never forget.

She stayed with you.

She’d stayed with me for years.

“I miss it sometimes,” she said, her eyes on my old house again. There were only a few lights on, one of them belonging to the room that used to be Mallory’s. “The freedom of being a kid, the innocence. Nothing had touched us yet, you know? Nothing hurt. Every day was full of possibilities. We had our whole lives ahead of us.”

“It’s not like we’re dead, Tadpole.”

She breathed a laugh. “I almost forgot about that nickname, you know. Until you said it earlier this week.” Charlie took a sip of her coffee around another set of hiccups, her eyes avoiding mine. “How have you been, Reese?”

I’d talked about myself all night at the dinner table. I’d caught her and her parents up on Juilliard, the rigorous curriculum there, the performances in the city that had been everything I’d always dreamed of. I told them about my time working on Broadway in the orchestra pit, about my solo gig at a small, fancy restaurant in the Upper East Side. I’d even told them how I got started tutoring at Juilliard, where my desire to teach had outgrown my desire to do anything else on the piano.

But that’s not what Charlie was asking.

She was asking if I was okay since the day I lost my entire family, and I didn’t know how to answer her.

“I’ve been getting by,” I answered honestly. “Some days are easier than others.”

“How long has it been now?”

I swallowed. “Little over three years.”

Charlie hiccuped. If she hadn’t already had them before the conversation turned, I’d have thought she was crying.

“It’s not fair,” she whispered after a moment. “The guy who did that… thatawfulthing, he just got to die. He just got to end his own life and not own up to any of the pain he caused. He was a coward.”

That pressure was back in my chest, making it hard to breathe, let alone answer her. If I closed my eyes, I could still see the piano I played in their house that day. I was waiting for them to come home, showing up unannounced for dinner after a night of partying.

I was there to ask for money.

“He was,” I agreed when I found my voice again, my hand circling the amber liquid in my glass. I threw it back all at once, letting it sting on the way down. “Sometimes it doesn’t feel real, you know? It feels like it happened to someone else, like Mom, Dad, and Mallory are just on some vacation or something.”

I shook my head, staring at my empty glass a little longer before my eyes found the house again.

“The worst part is, the weeks after it happened were such a blur. It was all these interviews and people wanting to know the stories behind the victims. That’s their favorite part, you know? They’ll look for the heroes in the tragedy, or the lives taken too young. I had both. Dad covered Mom and Mallory to try to save them, and Mallory was a week away from graduating with her doctorate degree from NYU. She had a boyfriend, who had a ring he hadn’t given her. The reporters loved that shit. And I had to be the one to tell them the stories, to give them the pictures.”

“That must have been so hard,” Charlie said, and I heard her voice crack at the end.

“In a way. But it also kept my mind off things, at least momentarily. It was easier to think about it as a mass shooting rather than a personal attack. If that makes sense.” I laughed. “It probably doesn’t.”

“No, it does,” she assured me, and then we were both quiet again.