The Insiders (The Insiders Trilogy 1)

His thumb spread over my cheek. “Tell me about your mom. I want to understand her through you.”

So I did. I told him she was a Gemini, how she took that to heart. She had the “mom” side that was strict and prideful. No help from anyone who might have strings attached. She had learned that lesson somewhere along the line. I had to go to school, go home right after. She didn’t like not knowing where I was, even if she was working the second shift. She’d call the landline by four every afternoon to make sure I was home, and would call on each of her breaks so I didn’t have time to sneak out and get kidnapped—her words, and the significance was now just setting it.

“Oh my God.”

“What?”

“She knew. You’re right. She knew. She was worried about me being taken.” My chest tightened. “I thought that was just something every mom worried about, you know, just being a mom.”

“That is something every mom worries about.” He was watching me intently. “Just had an extra meaning with her, that’s all.”

“Yeah.”

“Tell me about the other side to her.”

He was prompting me, still gently. He didn’t want me to sit and stew so my guilt would flare up. I was here. She was there. She was hurting, and I’d been the cause. But after he said my name again, I told him about her other side.

“Single moms, young moms, they don’t want to grow up sometimes. That was her too. I mean, she was. She was grown up. But in other ways she wasn’t. I was the one who didn’t want to party on New Year’s Eve, and she did. I didn’t like to go trick-or-treating. She did. She’s everything I’m not, honestly. Ditzy at times with social things, everyday life things. Money, parenting, work, that stuff she’s great at. Everything else, not. But she’s fun.” I was grinning before I knew it. “She got tipsy one night at the VFW and she was playing peekaboo with me from outside the house that night. I thought it was so funny.

“She likes adventures. You know that story on the news, of the woman who drank wine out of a chip container in that discount store, riding around in the cart? That’s something she’d do. She wasn’t reckless. She’d be smart about it. But yeah, she liked doing silly things like that. Like getting pulled on a sled behind a lawn mower because we couldn’t afford any other way to do rides like that. Or building forts in the living room and sleeping there for a few nights. Ghost stories. Sneaking up on her friends when they’d go camping and scaring them. Things like that.”

I was missing my mom. I was missing her a whole lot.

And after I finished talking, when the tears rolled down—the good but missing kind—Kash picked me up and carried me to bed.

We stayed there the rest of the afternoon.

FORTY-TWO

I could feel the bass through our feet.

Once we stepped inside that nightclub, the same one Matt had brought me to so long ago, the dry ice assaulted us. The difference from that night to this one was that I was walking inside with Kash. My hand held with his. He was leading me. We came in through the back way, greeted by the same worker who had helped us last time.

She nodded, a ghost of a smile on her face.

“Welcome, Mr. Colello. Ms.” She still didn’t know my name, and that was partly my work, partly my father’s. His program was still at work, and every photograph of Kash that hit the internet disappeared after minutes. Even the print news referenced Kash but not me. There were pictures of me, but no name printed. They apparently didn’t know who I was, and I had to wonder how long that would last.

Knowing who Kash was, exactly, told me what a feat that was, for him to remain as mysterious as he was. He explained that it was partly because his grandfather had never publicly announced him or his relation, and Kash had never stepped up to take over his father’s shares. Once he did that, his privacy would be gone. He’d be firmly in the spotlight. I understood why he kept to the background as much as possible, but with his association with my father’s family, I also had to wonder how realistic that would be. It was only a matter of time before someone got a picture that couldn’t be deleted, no matter how magical my father’s program was.

So the worker not knowing my name was partly because the ones who’d gotten pictures of me didn’t know who I was. There’d been one, but I had hacked her and deleted everything she had of me, Kash, and Matt. And there’d been an entire file on Matt.