I enter my house from the side and make my way upstairs to wake Rowan. She’s already prowling around her bedroom when I get there, and I gulp down the guilt of leaving her alone. I’m still riding my high and feel like I’m vibrating all over. I hate to see her right after leaving one of my girls, but it’s something I’ve learned to deal with over the years. My alter ego slips into place with more ease when it’s Rowan because I don’t have to pretend to feel around her. I do feel. If I could love completely like normal people, it would be for her.

“My little girl is growing up,” I say from my doorway, pride evident in my voice. And I am proud. This unity wasn’t one I planned, but look how well I did raising a child. It’s amazing what the internet and text books can teach you. They make it almost too easy for people like me. They give us the tools we need to stay under the radar. To fit in among the lesser mortals.

Rowan grins over at me, and the brightness in her smile could rival the sun. She’s such a vision. Nothing like her mother, although I’ve lied to her many times saying so.

She’s looking directly at me, and in her eyes, I see love and devotion. My daughter doesn’t see the emptiness echoing inside my gut. The darkness lurking in my mind. She will always be Daddy’s little girl, only seeing the best in me.

“Hey,” she replies, flashing her brilliant white teeth.

I push off the frame of her door and enter her room, holding my arms out to hug her. I can’t believe she’s eighteen.

She hugs me back with vigor, then starts to pull away. Her eyes drop to a stain I hadn’t noticed on my shirt. It’s small, but it’s there. A blood splatter screaming up at me, and my Rowan has seen it. It must have been when I went back for a last kiss. I knew her skin was broken with the scratches of the glass, but I was careless, foolish. All the high drains from me, anger at myself taking its place.

I’ve worked my entire life to keep this part of me from her. She will never know the demon who rattles against his cage inside me.

“Did you hurt yourself?” she asks, pointing to the spot with a frown before checking over my body.

My smile and happiness from moments before has extinguished like water on a fire, and she notices the change in me. I can see it in her body tensing slightly. I say the first thing that comes to mind.

“Yeah, shaving.”

Her mouth pops open, but then closes. I need to take her mind off it, and off the fact that I want to punch a wall.

“Rowan, how mad at me would you be if I rescheduled your birthday dinner?” I ask, changing the subject. A little part of her light penetrates my heart as she chuckles, and I sigh internally.

“Depends on the reason.” She narrows her eyes, playing with me.

Rubbing a hand over the back of my neck, I shrug. “I met this woman recently…”

Her eyes expand and elation flushes her cheeks. “You have a date!” she screeches, a huge smile plastered on her face.

A date? Sort of.

I want to go back and watch from the trees as Mary returns home from work and finds my Stacy.

“Something like that.” I smirk, giving her the hope she wants so badly of me finding someone. I just wish she could understand I don’t need anyone but her.

Her and me is how I like it.

How it will always be.

“Go!” she tells me with a giggle. “And take a shower. You stink.”

I return her laugh, lifting the shirt over my head. “I promise I’ll make it up to you.”

“I know you will.”

My gaze flits over to the dollhouse I made her, and a genuine smile lifts my lips. I want to shrink her down and keep her inside that dollhouse, to keep her safe. To keep her from ever learning she lives with Jekyll and Hyde.

I leave her to get dressed and take the stairs two at a time down to the foyer. I grab the fire lighter and march to the back of the house, pushing out the bi-folding doors to the yard. I throw a couple logs onto the firepit and light the thing.

Once the flames ignite, I chuck the shirt into the fire, watching the golden licks pull the fabric into its embrace and turn it to ash.

“You killed someone or something.” A voice comes from behind me. I turn my gaze to his over my shoulder.

The sneaky little bastard. Usually, it’s impossible to sneak up on me. Nixon, the only son of Eric’s I consider an acceptable friend to Rowan, is standing there brazen and curious.

Curiosity killed the cat, little boy.

His words ring loud in my head. I’ve never killed a boy before, and his youthful age is too close to Rowan’s for me to be comfortable snuffing it out, but if he’s seen something he shouldn’t, what choice is there?

“I’m kidding, Mr. Wheeler.” He smirks and prods a stick into the firepit, helping the fire destroy the remnants of my shirt. Under his breath, he mutters, and in the quiet, I can tell he’s counting. Counting what? I don’t know.

“What are you doing here?” I growl, grabbing him by the collar of his shirt. Not because I care, but because it’s the response I should have and hopefully it will keep him from sneaking around the place.

He’s tall, like his father, and there’s something glaring back at me in his eyes. Something so familiar, if I could be unsettled by it, I would be.

It’s not fear; it’s something worse. It’s something I recognize every day in the mirror.

Indifference.

Darkness.

The monster lurking under the skin.

As if the blackness surging through him calms him, the counting grows quiet.

He takes my pause as I study him to his advantage and pushes me off him. He holds up a box and looks up to Rowan’s bedroom window.

“I just came to give Rowan her birthday present.”

I snatch the box from his hand and point to his house. “Go home. I’ll give this to her, and, Nixon?” I shout after him because he’s already begun to leave. He looks over his shoulder at me.

“Start using the front door, or I may mistake you for an intruder.” I make a gun with my fingers and gesture to the trigger being pulled, making sure to aim it at his head as I mouth, “Bang.”

A warning.

“Whatever,” he scoffs.

I turn my attention back to the fire, then to the box in my hand, creaking the lid open.

There’s a locket inside. A simple white gold heart. I open it, and my body tenses. It’s a picture of the woman in the few photos I gave to Rowan of her mother. Except they’re not actually of her mother. They’re from a clothing catalogue that came in the junk mail. She kept asking about her mother and what she looked like when she was little, so I gave her something to hold onto, to look at and love. The woman had the same coloring as Rowan and she was beautiful, so I laminated the pictures and framed them.

She can never know this deceit. She can never know her mother didn’t die during childbirth…well, not in the complication aspect of childbirth.

The picture in the locket isn’t one I’ve given Rowan, so Nixon must know my lies. But to what extent? And how?

I throw the chain into the fire and roll my head over my shoulders, cracking my neck.

He may have to go after all.