I unlaced the leather strap and flipped to the first page. Immediately, I recognized his handwriting. The date jotted at the side was close to seven years ago.
The road’s tough. Especially nights like these when everyone is passed out around me. I can never sleep. Who would have known the loneliest time in the world is the moment before the sun comes up? Night after night, I meet that moment intimately. I know it like a lover even when there’s no comfort in its touch. It’s worth it. The band is worth it. But I get the sense I’ll never know what it’s like to be home.
I rubbed my hand over my face and tried to break up the overwhelming urge to weep. Killed me he’d felt this way. I rifled through more pages. Most of the entries echoed the same, sometimes skipping months. Getting just a little more desperate with each passing year.
I tried. I fucking tried. Baz got out of jail and got clean. I tried. I tried.
Why hadn’t I done something? Intervened?
I wavered, part of me wanting to slam the damned journal closed. Close it up and forget. But the other felt compelled. I skimmed through more pages where Mark had recorded just how lost he’d felt.
When I turned another page, my sight narrowed in on the handwriting that had turned messy and frantic, slanting crooked down the page.
I fucked up. Fucked up bad. Donny told me Martin said it’d only be once. Once. That was all it was supposed to be.
What the fuck?
He was talking about Jennings.
My heart rate sped and I sat up higher on my knees, fingers gripping the journal as I scanned for more.
Fucking Donny and his fucking mouth. Always with his fucking mouth. I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want any part of it. I knew Martin was sick. Both of them were sick. But not that sick. I told Martin so. I told him to go to hell when he demanded the money I owe him. Told him I’d take everything I know to the cops. I was going to anyway, money be damned. I knew what he’d had Donny do to that girl. I knew what he planned to have him do. She was a loose end. A liability. Just like me. Call me a snitch. I didn’t care. Let the asshole burn.
A thread of awareness dangled in my periphery, something ominous and dark. Felt like I couldn’t grab a breath when I desperately flipped the page. A small stack of snapshots fell out from between the pages, fluttering to the floor. What my attention immediately latched on to was what Mark had written on the page.
Donny’s gone. Dead in the water. I’m going to be next. I know it. Feel it coming. Am I scared? Yeah. Terrified, really. I led Martin on. Made him believe I’d leaked info. Ratted him and Lester out. He thinks I’m blackmailing, but I don’t have anything but Donny’s word. And Donny’s word is about as valuable as a ten-dollar whore. My only intention had been to thwart the plans he had to hurt that girl again. Only this time, make it final. Sick. Fucking sick. Couldn’t live with myself if it happened, so I’d rather die stopping it. I guess I finally did something in my life worth a shit.
It was dated two days before he’d overdosed.
Cold dread seized my heart, everything going heavy, like it was attempting to pump ice through my veins.
He killed him.
Oh God. My head spun. He killed him.
With trembling fingers, I reached down and picked up one of the pictures that’d fallen face down on the floor, hesitant to discover what was there, but knowing I couldn’t look away.
It was a snapshot of Mark and Donny and my baby brother. The party happening around them was clear. All three of them were obviously lost to a bombed-out wasteland.
But it was the woman Donny had draped across his lap that shook me to the core. A face so fucking familiar, that the breath punched from my lungs and left me on a shocked wheeze.
I’d seen that face hanging on Shea’s upstairs wall more times than I cared to count. Showcased in old frames, appearing years younger there than in this image. The woman who’d pushed her and pushed her and pushed her, Shea’s childhood memories a horror story of manipulation and greed.