Page 36 of The Diamond in the Rough

I looked up. “He didn’t tell you what happened at Tranquil Brook?” that was surprising.

“No, he told me that.” Raj cleared his throat a little, took a sip of water, then set down the glass, slowly turning it with the fingers of one big hand. “He didn’t mention that you were a patient there, though. Not until very recently.”

“Oh.” That also probably meant that Raj didn’t know about my uncle.

I was saved from having to think up something else to say by the return of the server, who took our orders—Raj asked for an Eisenhower sandwich and ordered loaded pimento cheese fries to share, and I settled on the Lafayette. I fiddled with the napkin end, trying to figure out a way to continue the conversation without it going somewhere I didn’t want it to go.

“Your family… sent you there?” he asked, then, giving me something I could at least answer.

“Yes.” I swallowed. How much could I tell him?

“Because of your magic?”

“Yes.” It was the truth, and a safe enough answer, given his question, but I still felt guilty because there really was so much more to it than that.Because I’m a death witch, and I killed my uncle.Except that felt like far too much informationto share with someone I barely knew, and also far,fartoo much to share with an FBI agent.

I knew—of course I did, working at Beyond the Veil—that there was no statute of limitations on murder. And I was a murderer, even though the story that everyone told was that it had been an accident. Maybe, if you wanted to stretch a point, you could claim it had been self-defense, but even I thought that was pushing the limits of what the phrase meant.

But I’d only ever told my mother what I’d done—and that was what had gotten me sent to Tranquil Brook to begin with. Locked up, key thrown away, magic repeatedly stripped from me. I’m not sure when exactly that began—when you’re a child locked in a place like Tranquil Brook, time becomes more than a little fuzzy.

I hadn’t even told Ward, even obliquely, through the fairy tale version I’d explained to him in his dream, that I’d killed my uncle. Just that I’d been responsible for his fall down the stairs. Which I had been. It’s just that I didn’tpushhim, exactly. I’d just taken his life as he’d lurched forward, and gravity did the rest.

I wasn’t about to tell Rajesh Parikh, Federal Agent, that I was a murderer.

The weird part was that I felt bad about it. Not about killing my uncle—about keeping it from Raj.

I’d never particularly felt guilty about not telling Ward or Mason or Beck that I’d killed my uncle on purpose. I knew they wouldn’t like it, but I didn’t feel bad for not telling them. They knew that I was responsible for my uncle’s death, even though they assumed it had been at least semi-accidental, and none of them seemed to judge me for it.

Yet I was worried that Raj would judge me, and I didn’t like the idea that he might.

“I’m sorry,” he said, only making me feel worse.

I shrugged. It was something Ward did when people expressed sympathy about his spinal injury. “It’s over now,” I replied. It was one of the more banal things I could say.

Raj grimaced. “Now I feel like a jerk for asking,” he said, his mouth still a little twisted. “You probably don’t much want to talk about it.”

I shrugged again. “Talking isn’t the problem,” I said softly. Thinking about it wasn’t pleasant, but it was what had happened to me. I couldn’tnotthink about it—or I shouldn’t, anyway, at least according to the psychologist I’d seen for the first few years after being released. It was healthy to think about it sometimes, to acknowledge that it had happened, to process, and then to return to the present.

Or so the psychologist had told me.

Most of the time, I could think about it in the abstract—like it had happened to someone else rather than to me. But, sometimes, it snuck up on me. A slithery feeling like I’d sometimes gotten around some of the orderlies and doctors who reveled in their power over us, making us feel fear or driving us deeper into depressive episodes. Sometimes far enough that patients took their own lives, either to end their personal torment or to escape the endless cycles of psychological, physical, sexual, and metaphysical torture inflicted on those of us who had natural or post-viral arcane abilities.

There were a handful of patients without magic—they didn’t last very long, either because their families would reclaim them or because they couldn’t withstand the onslaught.

None of this was exactly what you would call ‘dinner conversation,’ though, so I wasn’t sure what to say to Raj.

Across the table, he grimaced. “Sorry. It’s none of my business, anyway.” He cleared his throat. “And it’s not very pleasant, I’m sure, so we should talk about something else.”

I nodded, but I’d started down a spiraling mental pathway, and I wasn’t sure how to pull myself back up out of it, unable to think about anything else besides Tranquil Brook.

Raj coughed a little. “You don’t—play sports or anything?”

I looked up at him, blinking, as though I’d just stepped out into the light. “No?” I didn’t. I’d never, as far as I could remember, played any kind of sport.

“Do you watch?”

I shook my head.

He grimaced. “Me, neither, honestly,” he said. “Hart does—he’s obsessed with the Packers.”