I glance down at the table and then slowly bring my eyes up to his. For a moment, I see the man I used to love like a brother and a friend.

“I just want to understand what happened,” I say after a moment. “How things went so wrong.”

He shakes his head.

“You don’t want to tell me?”

“What do you want to know?”

“Why…Why did you…why did you follow me and attack me?” I ask.

His eyes focus on mine and I see a tenderness there that I hadn’t seen in a long time. But then he blinks, and it vanishes.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Olive,” he says.

His voice is dead and stoic.

“Why are you being like this?” I mumble.

“Do you think I’m stupid?”

“No.”

“Do you think I’m an idiot?”

“No.”

“Then why do you fucking treat me like I am?”

“What are you talking about?” I ask.

“I know what you’re doing here, Olive. I’m not a fucking moron!”

My blood runs cold.

Shivers race down my spine as every muscle within me freezes.

He knows why I’m here?

How?

“Everything we say is being recorded. I’m not going to talk to you about what happened or didn’t happen so you can make your shitty case against me better. You know what you did, Olive. You know that everything in that police report is a lie. You and I both know that.”

The first breath is the hardest but once the air fills my lungs, the others come much faster and smoother. He was so confident and self-assured that he scared me when he said he knew why I was here. But now that I know he thinks that it’s all about his attack, I have the upper hand.

“We don’t have to talk about that,” I say quietly, pretending to give him ground.

“What do you want to talk about then?”

“Us.”

He narrows his eyes, trying to read me.

I relax my face and sit back.

I have nothing to hide because in reality I do want to talk about us.

“What happened to us?” I ask. “I really cared about you as my brother. All of those letters you wrote to me in prison, were they just lies?”

His shoulders slope down as he adjusts his seat. Talk to me, I say silently to myself over and over again. Just talk to me.

“Of course not. Everything I said was nothing but the truth.”

“What about your plans for when you got out? When we got to California, you just seemed to let them go.”

He shrugs.

“Doesn’t matter now, huh?”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“I broke my parole.”