A group of friends tries to piece itself back together after losing its glue.
*****
It's a quiet October morning in Palo Alto, California, when the news break out--June Beaumont was...
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LEON
My entrails were on fire.
I wanted to believe the police, especially since they were supposed to know what they were doing—they certainly knew a lot more than we did—but it wouldn't be the first time I'd witness them lying. They had lied to me, wanting me to confess to a crime I hadn't committed.
I couldn't believe them. I couldn't trust them.
It all sounded so convenient, too; it was the easy way out, the solution that wouldn't force them to keep searching for evidence or for a suspect. It was so much easier to rule it an accident and expect us all to go our merry way.
Christina glanced at me from the corner of her eye, but quickly looked away as soon as I met her gaze, as though she was scared of me. I didn't understand why, nor I thought there was a valid reason for it, but no words came out of my mouth. If I tried to speak, I'd probably throw up all over the living room.
On the other corner of the room, Meridian's face was as pale as bone, knuckles so white as he gripped the back of a chair with all his strength. That I could handle; what I couldn't, however, was Sofia. I knew that even shooting the briefest of looks her way would result in a catastrophe, so I tried my hardest to ignore her presence in the room and focused on something else.
Anything else would do, so I used my anger.
Meridian was on the phone by the time anything of relevance happened, as we slowly pulled ourselves out of our frozen, shocked states, and it took every ounce of strength in my body to remain rational. If we were in San Francisco to find answers, we had to find them at some point; after all, June had been the one to point us in this direction.
The problem was that I wasn't entirely sure what else we were searching for. All we knew was that June had been terribly unhappy before she died, possibly a combination of her pregnancy, her ruined plans, and the career-ending injury weighing on her ankle. We knew she couldn't have hit herself on the back of the head. We knew she was heavily intoxicated—I knew about it firsthand.
But how had the police ruled out foul play? What were we missing?
It made no sense.
I'd known June like the back of my hand, and I knew she would never do something as irrational as drinking so much she couldn't even control her behavior. It went against everything she stood for—she and her type A personality—and she'd know better. Even if her drunken state explained some things—most of the entire situation, honestly—I knew there was more to it.
