My chest thumps with a hiccup which draws a strange sad smile from the two of us.
“I forgive you.” She tweaks her brows as if this were her check-mate in our game of psychological chess.
Allison has always been a generous woman. But not this generous.
“I haven’t asked for your forgiveness”—I frown while inspecting her for clues—“yet.”
“But I could feel it coming.” She glances over her shoulder at the lights shining outside, the constant vigil of reporters waiting for that one big break. “I’m not over this. I’m not over us. I don’t know what I want where we’re concerned, but I have to get Reagan back first. We have to keep her our priority, and then we can dismantle one another all we want.” A single tear rolls down her cheek, and I catch it with my fingertip.
My heart pounds like a freight train barreling its way to hell. “You want a truce.” I’ll take it. A few months ago, admitting this to her was my biggest nightmare, my biggest fear, and here I spilled every dirty detail, and she still hasn’t plucked my eyes out and shoved them down my throat.
“We should focus on Reagan.” My fingers press into her flesh as I attempt to pull her close, but her body goes rigid.
“You’ll sleep downstairs now that your father is gone.”
“Done.” Thank God she didn’t ask me to leave the house. There’s still time. Time to get on her good side. Time to prove that I’m a changed man. To prove that nobody could love Allison more than me.
“You won’t speak with her again.”
My gut cinches. Hailey seemed pretty convinced that the child she’s carrying is half mine.
“I won’t,” I whisper as my fingers find a home in her warm soft hair.
But deep down I’m afraid I will.
* * *
The next day goes by in a blur, then the next as if someone pressed fast-forward on time. I’ve spent the hours lost in a thick sea of slumber. One long glorious dream in which I forget the world after the other, and then just like that, I’m reminded of the fact some sick bastard has my child, my beautiful, beautiful little girl and could be doing who knows what to her, and suddenly I want to rip my own balls off for enjoying such a luxury instead of running through the streets screaming her name, tearing each and every house in Concordia apart, ripping through drywall and floorboards until the bones become exposed in my hands.
My father is MIA, no calls for the last two days, won’t pick up his damn phone, so I figure I’d better pay him a visit. In the evening, I tell Ally I’m headed over and invite her to come along, but she opts out, citing the need for a nice long shower. I scoop my keys up and assure her I’m coming right back. She’ll know whether I’m lying or not once that asshole she has trained on me reports back to her. Not that she doesn’t have a right to put a GPS in my pants. I’ve certainly given her a reason.
The drive to the country isn’t a long one. It’s a quiet one, though. Reagan has been my singular focus for the last several weeks, and yet I’ve been impotent to help her. And that girl that was with her, Ota—not one family came forward to claim her. Not even that witch Dolla Chetney could figure that one out. You know if you stump a celebrity psychic you’ve got some real problems on your hands.
Ota. Who the hell was she? Is she? Was she human? Was she another one of my children that seems to be coming out of the woodwork lately? First Monica, then Hailey. I grimace into the road.
That promise I made to Allison comes back to me. How am I going to stay away from the woman who just might be having my child? I should probably wait until she has the baby, then request a paternity test. If the baby isn’t mine, I go out for beer. If it is—I cross that bridge when I get to it. Right now, the only child on earth I care about is Reagan.
I pull into my father’s lumpy and ever so long driveway, only to find him sitting on the porch, drink in hand. I park and hop out, grimacing at the sight of him.
“Howdy.” He lifts his bottle, but his sentiment came out dry.
“Howdy, yourself. You know you had me worried. Where the hell have you been?”
“Here and there.” His gray eyes stare silently ahead. In the two days we’ve been apart, he looks older, grayer, and far more frayed around the edges.
I take a seat on the railing and lean back against the post.
“That’s a ten foot drop if you fall.” His voice tumbles out slow and gravely. “You break your neck, and I might just smother the life out of you—put you out of your misery.”
My insides tense in a knot. “Why not? You’re pretty good at putting people out of their misery.”
His eyes flit to mine, nothing but white glossy shards. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“What do you want it to mean?” I lean over and pluck the beer right out of his hand before giving it a sniff. “I’m pretty sure there’s no antifreeze in this.” I knock back a quick gulp and taste a cigarette on the lip.
“Boy, you have ten seconds to explain yourself before I boot you off my property.” His voice rises, well-controlled and teeming with percolating aggression.
“Just like you booted Mom? The way you emptied the attic of every last memory of who we were as a family?”
He brings his chin close to his chest, his brows pointing an angry V right at me. Flames shoot from his ears, he’s so irate—I must be right.
“Why did you do it?” My gaze latches onto those demonic eyes of his and I can feel the need in me to kill him. I don’t see why not. Offing another human being seems to be in my DNA.
“I needed some space.” He leans into his seat as if weighing his options. “What do you care? Just a bunch of pictures and boxes of tinsel. Damn stuff collected dust for close to forty years, long before you were born. Some of those boxes hadn’t been touched in that long either.”
“Did you need the space or were you tired of being haunted by all those long-gone faces?” I turn toward him, my feet planted on the creaky floorboards beneath me.
He gives a flick of the hand, his tired eyes moving toward the mountains in the distance wearing its fog-laden halo. “I know what they looked like. So do you.”
“Do you see their ghosts? Do they gather around your bed at night, tormenting you? Begging to know the reason you decided there was no more room on the planet for them?”
His eyes click over once again, a flash of guilt buried in each one.
“That’s right.” I raise his disgusting beer at him before chucking it over the railing. “I know what you did to Wilson. I know what you did to Mom.” That last sentence comes out tired, a secret whispered in the night that I wish never broke the seal of my lips. “But what I don’t get is why Rachel? How?” I stagger over and pull him out of his seat by the neck. “How did you kill my sister?” I shout so loud my voice reverberates off the mountainside.
He slaps my hands off his body quick and heavy like the trunk of a tree falling over me. “Let go.” His hands grip my shirt and pull me in close. “You think you can come to my house and spew these sick vicious lies? I tell you what—if there was a member of this family I should have slaughtered, it would have been you.” He sends me flying into the post and I hit my forehead over a rusted nail. I touch my hand over it and it glows pink under the light.