Page 130 of Drift

Yeah. There it was.

Disorderly conduct.

Jan briefly closed his eyes. “Because sometimes he’s there with you, then sometimes he’s… not, huh? He has absences and doesn’t remember what happens during the fall?”

“When did they start? The headaches?” Martin said from across the table, and Drift looked at him. “Can you remember?”

Drift leaned back in the chair and folded his arms. He wasn’t here to talk headaches and shit.

“Okay… let’s come at this another way.” Martin tapped West’s mobile phone. “Talk to me about this. Talk to me about Grace. About Ava.”

Drift stared down at the phone.

Playlists. How many times had he used West’s phone to store his own? Now Thomas Day’s “Not My Job Anymore” scrawled across the screen.

Martin eased back in his chair. “Look, you owe no one an explanation or an apology for keeping your silence. You don’t have to say anything.” He pushed the phone over until it satclose enough for Drift to take back. “I don’t know the song. I don’t know this Grace or what she’s done as Ava. So it stays that way if you call it. Because nobody belongs sorting around in your head but you, right? The whole point around here lately.”

Drift levelled a look on him. “Yet you bargain talk over any potential family with asking about the song and Ava.”

Martin shook his head. “I’maskingabout your time before you ran to the street. And I’ll offer my frankness over personal medical details in exchange for yours in order to help you understand where the headaches may come from. Yours starts with a song and a sister. Mine with a name: Jack. Both sound simplistic, but the application into the wider context of living, loving, or lack thereof of either is… complex.” He offered a small smile. “But you have my word I will always be frank with you no matter how much it hurts, because it’s playing with half-truths and missing detail that makes us blind and feeds headaches, right?” He searched Drift’s look. “I don’t dance blindfolded. And with the look I’m seeing about you here, I won’t let you play with half details either, not with the headache I see building.”

The vibes he got off Martin were dark in tone, like a resonation fork set to tune, working out the mood of the listener in the quiet. He worked on watching people, Drift saw that, so he damn well knew it wasn’t only his choice of words under the microscope here, how he refused to touch the phone, mostly because he felt so… dirty.

“And if I say no to any talk,” he said flatly, “you’d be able to keep to any word you give and talk headaches to me?” It dug under his skin with how Martim seemed to know about them, about him and them. “Because I’m getting the feeling you’re only content when you’re reading people and playing head games.”

Martin nodded. “Like I said: you stay sharp with that ability to read people like me. But no,” he said quietly. “No games here, not with you. So tell me about this.” He tapped the phone. “The headaches surrounding touching it. Who got you running from home to find safety, because I think that’s it with you: you don’t run away from trouble—you run to find safety and shelter. You run to find West. Only something that’s gone on with you and Grace is stopping you from holding on to West, so you run harder… faster each time to try and catch up to a safety that only causes more… headaches.”

Drift sniffed, shrugged. “No huge secret.” He picked the phone up. “I fucked up,” he said flatly. “I didn’t read the signs when a foster father took a liking to one of his kids.”

Chapter 37

NO SAVING GRACE

Jan sat forward in his chair. “What? Wait.Farland? Who did he touch? Grace or Drift?” Anger ran under his skin. “And how does that fit in with Drift not remembering hitting you?”

West messed with the arm of the cinema chair almost as if unravelling any stitching to the leather would give her the meaning to why hell’s gate stood open.

“Grace,” she said eventually. “Farland raped Grace.”

Jesus. How old? How old back then? Drift was eight, that made Ava… ten. Jan rubbed at his head. Fuck.

“Oh, that right there…” said West, drawing his attention, and such a hard smile came. “Don’t. Don’t ever be bloody fooled by her.”

“Ten years old, West. Just ten.”

“Don’t lecture me on minors. I look out for some who have been so badly torn apart, they tear into their own skin just so it hurts in ways they can control. But with Ava…” West said flatly. “Some kids are just born… wrong. And Farland, he fucked up. He messed with a bitch who was just coming into her own.”

Martin tapped a finger at the kitchen table almost as if to focus Drift. “Grace. How did it start. How did it end?”

Drift tensed his jaw, flatlining all feeling. “Does it really matter? It happened, that’s all.”

“Yeah,” Martin said evenly. “Inciting incidents always will matter. So tell me.”

Drift frowned. “Farland came out of her bedroom as I tried to get a glass of milk one night. Nothing unusual in that, only he paused, just standing there. Despite the cold of the landing, the sweat coating his body and his heavy breath was at odds with how tired the night felt, and the air around him felt… wrong. Not black-eyed wrong that I see in Ava’s eyes… in here, just… dirty, sick.”

He focused back down on fussing Neffi.

“Farland said nothing, just got me my milk and went off to his room, so I slipped into Grace’s.” Didn’t matter how far the distance he tried to force between mind and body, it still hurt. But he knew, he damn well knew it had hurt Grace so much more no matter how she walked as though she owned the world now. And that was the whole issue. He’d seen her when hurthadregistered in such young eyes. “She’d been abandoned in a flat to start with, so the one-year-old in her who’d been left alone always met everyone with arms wide open and this warm smile,almost as if she was too scared to show anything but happiness. She did the same with me as she’d always done: arms open, a smile to come cuddle up in bed with her like any normal night.”

---