Grayson

Fifteen years later…

Thomas is different than most kids his age. Brooding and introspective. He harbors dark thoughts but never acts on them. I don’t miss the storm that brews in his icy blue eyes that match mine exactly. A storm he needs to gain control of.

His three younger sisters are all loud, playful, and funny.

It’s as if he stands out like a sore thumb in his own family with his frowns and sulking.

I know it bothers Violet, but she doesn’t understand him. I’m the only one who gets what goes on in that mind of his. And it’s long past time for me to help him gain control.

“Daddy! Daddy!” my youngest daughter Emily screeches as she comes barreling down the hallway. I scoop up my four-year-old and squeeze her tight.

“Where’s your brother?” I question with a smile.

Her lip pouts out. “Hiding in his room. He told me to go away.”

I kiss her forehead. “Thomas is getting to be a big boy now. He likes to do grown up things. Why don’t you go play with your sisters? Later we’ll walk down to the creek behind the house.”

“Yay!” she squeals. “I want to catch a lightning bug.”

I set her to her feet and ruffle her hair. “Maybe Thomas can help you catch one.”

Her nose scrunches as if she doesn’t believe me. Then she changes subjects on a dime like she’s notorious for doing. “When can we go to the beach again? I want to build a sand castle.”

The kids love the resort. We spend at least three weeks there during the summer. It’s a place where my family can laugh and play without a worry in the world. The mother is involved and the father is kind. It’s what I always wanted.

“We’ll go soon,” I promise.

She bounds off through the house to look for her sisters. I turn and stride in the opposite direction toward Thomas’s room. When I twist the knob and walk in, a familiar pang settles in my chest. His room is immaculate. It reminds me so much of mine growing up. He sits in his desk chair hunched over looking in a shoebox in his lap.

“What’re you doing, kiddo?”

He looks up from the box and shrugs. “I found this.”

I stride over to him and drop to one knee to look in the box. When I see an old squirrel skull, I smile at him. “Did you find it in the woods?”

“Yeah. Can I keep it?”

“Of course.” I meet his sharp stare. “How do you think he died?”

Something flickers in his eyes. Curiosity. The fact that anything flickers in him surprises me. He walks around so emotionless all the time. “I don’t know. Got eaten by a puma maybe?”

I smirk. “Maybe he ate a bad nut or starved to death.”

“What if a dog bit his tail off and he bled to death?” he asks as he picks up the tiny skull.

He hands it to me and I turn it over in my palm. “You know, Thomas, you’re a lot like me.”

His shoulders stiffen. “I guess.”

“I get obsessed with things. People. Stuff. Ideas. Does that ever happen to you?”

Our eyes meet, and for a moment, he looks so vulnerable and lost. It crushes me.

“Maybe sometimes.”

“It can be kind of scary. Thinking about something to the point of exhaustion, huh?” I ask.

He nods and takes the skull from my palm before sticking it back in the box. “Yeah.”

“I want to tell you a story.”

For the next thirty minutes, my son morphs from a brooding boy to someone who once again has light in his eyes. The secret obsessions he’d been harboring were set free. It sure makes a difference when you have someone to share them with. I always had Bull. Now I have Violet. And Thomas has me.

“I hate him,” he growls, his voice surprisingly deep. Another few years and my boy will be grown up. He’ll turn into a man before my very eyes.

“I hate him too.”

My father was an awful man. After spending all that time in the hospital and once I was nursed back to health by my loving mother, I went to see him in the city. I followed and watched him. My father became my obsession.

He was a monster.

Not just toward me, but toward everyone.

A liar. A cheat. A thief.

I’d uncovered how he embezzled from his company. How he slept with anything that was female. And his computer that was littered with sick shit that no eyes should ever have to see.

I didn’t like watching him through the window but I did.

I hated the way he touched himself while looking at pictures of my sister.

So I took care of the problem.

I set my sights on him.

“Want to see?” I ask Thomas.

He nods eagerly. Together we go to my room and stand in front of the chest. I tell him the combination. Once he pulls the lock free, he lifts the lid with a creak.

“This must be Wail,” he points to a plastic zippered bag full of my pet’s bones.

“That’s him.”

His fingers run across the plastic and he smiles sadly at me. “I’m sorry, Dad.”

“It’s okay.”

He refuses to touch the other. Curled into a fetal position is a full skeleton in pristine condition. Aside from the gaping hole missing from the skull. A human skull. My father.

“How’d you do it?”

I kneel beside him and run my finger along the jagged hole. “I shot him at his favorite hunting site on some land upstate he owned.”

I eliminated my target.

“He deserved it,” he assures me, clutching my shoulder. For once in what feels like years, I’m connecting with my son again. It’s like he’s found a way out of his darkness and discovered me.

We’re the same.

We’re special.

“I’ll never tell a soul,” he vows, his gaze serious. He knows how important it is to keep the secret from his grandma, his aunt Gwen, and his mother. “But, Dad?”

“Yeah, buddy?”

He beams at me—a smile that reminds me exactly of Violet. “Will you teach me how to shoot?”

I grin back as I close the chest. “You want to be a sniper one day?”

“Maybe,” he says as he hooks the lock into place and snaps it closed. “But mostly, I just want to be like you.”