When Old Days Burn Out

I tore through every post on my cousin Julian's account like a man possessed.The first one went up five years ago. Wedding photos. The caption read, [I finally got to take wedding photos with the woman I've loved for a long time. She loves being in front of a camera. We shot all day and she never got tired.]My eyes burned. Because the day before that post went up, Claire and I had taken our own wedding photos.In Julian's pictures, Claire smiled. She played along when he suggested a pose. When he kissed her, she went red to the ears. When she'd taken photos with me, her face had been blank the whole afternoon.Photo after photo filled in five years I'd never known existed. They'd traveled all over the world for destination shoots, one side of the planet to the other.Claire's a workaholic. At our own wedding she was still answering messages minutes before she walked into the ceremony. Somehow she'd found the time to fly out with Julian every couple of weeks for another shoot.T

I was close to hysterical. Claire only said, "Don't shout in here, Julian needs to rest. We'll talk on the roof."Even now, he came first.On the roof, she held out a bank card. "There's five million dollars on it. Consider it compensation."Seven years, and she thought what I wanted was a number on a card.I demanded an answer. She said nothing.Ryan lost patience first. "Ethan, people's feelings change. Can you stop making this harder than it has to be? Claire has only ever loved Julian. Be reasonable."I stared at him. Ryan had been my best friend since we were six. In high school his parents wanted him to drop out and take a job at a plant, and I handed over my allowance and everything I'd saved so he could finish. He cried and told me he'd spend the rest of his life paying me back.Apparently this was the payment.My mother grabbed my arm, and there was nothing in her voice but impatience. "Enough. Julian is your cousin. He lost both his parents when he was little. Why can

The storage room door crashed open and the light came in like a blade.The police weren't alone. Claire was with them, and when her eyes landed on me, the composure she never took off finally cracked."Ethan—"I flinched away from her hand without deciding to. It stopped in midair.One of the officers took in the room and settled on the door. "Who locked this?"Footsteps came down the hall. My mother and Ryan. The second she saw the room her eyes went red and she came at me with her arms out."Ethan! What happened in here? What—"I threw her hand off. "Don't touch me."A detective crouched down and put a blanket around my shoulders. The badge on her belt said Whitlock. My strength was coming back in pieces, but the cold that had gotten into my bones wasn't going anywhere.Claire turned on Ryan. "What happened here?"His face moved through two or three expressions before it settled on a strained smile. "Ethan was extremely worked up. I was worried he'd do something he couldn't

They had the corridor footage within the hour.On the screen, I walked to the storage room by myself, opened the door, and went in alone.Detective Whitlock frowned. "You're certain Ryan locked you in."I was freezing and I couldn't look away from the screen. "That's been altered."They pulled the hospital's monitoring logs. There was a fifteen-minute gap covering exactly the window in question, flagged by the system as a technical fault.My tox screen came back clean. Nothing in my blood at all.The whole thing looked like a production I'd staged myself.With nothing to hold, the police took the women in for questioning and left it there.Claire's face closed completely. She looked at me with open disappointment. "Ethan, how long are you going to do this? Julian has depression. Are you going to start pretending you're ill too? When did you turn into this?"She stopped looking at me and walked Julian back toward his room.People had collected in the hall by then, pointing, ta

In an interview room, Ryan was nothing like the man from the hospital corridor."I didn't know anything. I passed messages for Julian, that's all. I didn't know what he was planning. He's the one who contacted those women. I was the middleman."He looked at me through the glass, his face a mess of tears. "Ethan, more than ten years. You can't be this cold."I remember what you did for me. I'm grateful. I never wanted to hurt you. But Julian promised me that if I helped him I'd be made vice president. I've been working toward that for years—"The more he said, the less of it held together.I looked at him and couldn't find anyone I recognized. More than ten years, and it hadn't been worth as much as a title.Julian's case was more complicated. His depression diagnosis turned out to be fabricated, and the chain of evidence on the drugging and the arranged assault was complete. The missing quarter hour of hospital surveillance ended up being the most useful thing in the file. Invest