Free The Rules of Inheritance by Claire Bidwell Smith Page B

passenger window as Colin drove, staring out at the road rushing past and trying to imagine what we were driving toward, unable to conjure up anything specific.
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    In Kansas we drove over a family of ducks, a mom and her fuzzy little ducklings crossing the two-lane highway. We were going too fast to stop, Colin explained, and even though I repeated that sentence over and over in my head I couldn’t shake the queasy feeling that settled over me after that.
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    It’s been three months though, and I can no longer deny that the feeling has less to do with the ducks and much more to do with me and Colin, and the swiftly growing distance between us.
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    Six years is too long for anyone our age to be together, I’ve determined. We met a few months after my mother died, when I was eighteen. I had just moved back to Atlanta, dropping temporarily out of college, and moving into my old room at home. My dad slept in the guest room upstairs, unable to bring himself to sleep in the bed he had once shared with my mom.
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    While my friends continued on with their normal college lives, I started waiting tables at a café. Colin was the bartender. One night some of my high school friends sat on the patio of the café. I ignored my tables and leaned against the backs of my friends’ chairs, chatting idly.
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    Holly leaned forward suddenly. Hey, she said, isn’t that the guy who killed his sister?
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    I turned around to follow her gaze. She was watching Colin.
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    Tall with thick blond hair and dark eyes, Colin was the person at the café I’d talked to the least. He was always there at the end of the night, hanging around the bar with the rest of the staff, drinking beer and counting cash until we locked the doors and headed across the street to a corny piano bar that stayed open late and never carded us.
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    Colin? I said in response to Holly’s question.
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    That’s the guy who killed his sister, she repeated.
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    Oh yeah, Laura said, squinting at him. I recognize him from the newspaper.
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    Their faces were serious, watching Colin intently as he moved behind the bar, pouring drinks, wiping down the counter with a rag. I looked at my friends blankly.
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    It was all over the news, Laura said.
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    I think you were out of town, Holly finally said.
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    I had gone to Europe for six weeks with my friend Liz right after my mom died, and I suppose that was enough time for a big local news story like this to escape my attention.
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    Then they told me the story:
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    Colin had an older sister named Christine. She was twenty-one and home from college on spring break. About six weeks ago, while I was in Europe, Christine was home alone in the affluent suburban house where Colin and her parents lived. At three in the afternoon someone entered the house and stabbed her multiple times. Her younger brother, Colin, came home within the hour, found her there, covered in blood, no longer breathing.
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    Colin was immediately a suspect. His dark eyes, his penchant for driving too fast, for drinking too much, his timely arrival at his sister’s murder scene—all these things earned him a photo in the paper, a caption that read something like: “Brother Suspected in Local Girl’s Slaying.”
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    Within a week Colin’s name was cleared, his sister’s murder linked instead to a string of stabbings across Atlanta that spring. A new suspect was caught, charged, featured in the paper.
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    The more of the story my friends revealed, the more I fixated on Colin. Laura and Holly went on talking, dissecting the details of the case, but I had stopped listening. I watched Colin with a newfound interest.
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    He was tidying up the bar, moving with a kind of deliberateness that I liked. He wiped down bottles, rinsed the sinks, emptied the ice bin. He frowned as he worked, his eyes growing darker.
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    I was utterly transfixed by him, captivated by our