Let go of the past. It’s no longer yours, Mayra had said to me once, when I’d poked at my missing memory again.

But, of course, my past was mine—the only thing that was mine were the moments that made me who I was. When Bane had come into my life, so had the flashbacks. I liked to think of it as a way for Artem—Pam called him Art, she was embarrassed enough to admit she’d fallen pregnant by a Russian immigrant—to give me some of my sanity back.

I wanted to remember.

My legs hit the sand quietly, and I stared down at my own shadow, trying to regulate my breaths. I miss you, Old Sport.

Everything was falling apart around me, but I felt oddly tranquil. Free.

I looked up at the open sky, and it stared back at me. It was forming into a deeper and deeper shade of dark blue, like water spreading over a cloth, and I was trying to chase an invisible sun at the end of my track.

Why did you have to have an affair, Dad?

But it was obvious, and even I knew it. My mother had never been a good partner. They were never married. The way Pam had explained it to me one drunken night, when she’d stumbled back from her friend’s wedding and come to my room to check that I was still alive, was that they’d met at a dive bar. She’d studied classical literature in college, and Artem knew all about Pushkin and Dostoyevsky. They’d hit it off and ended up in bed the same night. They were both the wrong kind of wasted, and when morning came, so did their senses. He left her dorms, but then when she found out that she was pregnant with me, they’d tried to make it work.

I sometimes thought that my mom had her heart in the right place when all of this had happened, and maybe that’s the worst part.

She’d tried to be a mother, and a wife, but never consistently. She used to kick my dad out of the house for the smallest things. Because he hadn’t taken the trash out or had accidentally cut my bangs wrong or was late from work because he’d gotten caught up on a demanding case. Then the small stuff became big stuff, because he was just too frustrated. He’d drunk too much. He went MIA on us too much. He’d shown her that he loved her less and less. As with all loveless partnerships with children, they’d remained together hoping that someway, somehow, this would disappear.

It had rained the day he died. No, not rained, poured. I remembered thinking God was crying with me. I remembered thinking God was unfair, because I was already unhappy, and I hadn’t even done anything wrong.

At his funeral, there’d been a redheaded woman standing a few graves across, hiding behind big glasses. She was staring at us. I didn’t know why.

I now knew.

Then I remembered Darren stepping into the picture, conveniently close to the time Dad had died. The whole timeline of that year was a blur. Twelve is a bad age to lose a parent. You’re on the verge of a hormonal revolution, your body is blooming, your innocence is wilting, and everything feels personal.

At first, I thrust myself into Darren’s open arms willingly.

I’d been so thirsty for love, so unbearably lonely, I gulped up his attention like it was water in the desert.

And Pam had loved it. Us. For the first time since I was born, she’d looked at me with a smile on her face. Granted, it was because I’d played right into her second-family plan, but she’d enjoyed it nonetheless.

Then it happened.

It happened.

The flashback came, and with it, the terrible realization of how I’d gotten here, to this beach, at this hour, betrayed and stripped out of every meaningful relationship I’d ever had.

That night.

His back.

As he closed the door.

Locked it.

Put the key above the tall cabinet I couldn’t reach.

Turned around and said, lisplessly, “Hello, Jesse.”

I collapsed, my knees hitting the sand, my hands trying to grasp at it like it was ropes I could climb. Ropes leading to the entire flashback that was now so clear, so vivid, so real.

I shouldn’t have been there.

But I was.

I remembered the vodka bottle he placed in front of me.

It’d had a snowflake on it.

Eight Years Ago.

PAM CARTER JUST WANTED TO be taken seriously.

That’s what she told me, anyway, in the rare moment where she’d decided to acknowledge my existence.

“I have a lot of potential,” she said around the long cigarette tucked between her lips, looking at me through the rearview window of her crappy car. Her once-raven hair was now platinum blonde, her dark roots telling the story of her empty pockets. “I went to college, you know. Almost finished it, too.”

When Dad died, my mom looked almost relieved. He died in the stupidest possible way. He fell and broke his neck. The stairs leading to his office were wet. The last day of his life, I’d told her I needed new shoes, and she’d said, “We don’t have the money. Your dad has a new family, you know. A second one. Maybe that’s where all the money goes.”

I’d turned around to him, looked at his helpless face. “Is that true?”

He didn’t deny it.

Then, very calmly, with the tone I’d borrowed from her, I said, “I hate you. I never want to see you again.”

I carried this moment in my life like the mark of Cain.

I didn’t know when, exactly, Pam had met Darren, but I remembered the first time she told me about him. I believe it was akin to a royal wedding announcement. She’d said she’d fallen in love with a man, and that he was wonderful and caring. That I would love him, too.

We moved in with Darren four months after Dad had died, the weekend they got married in Todos Santos’ City Hall. There wasn’t much to tell about Darren. Everything he did, he did gingerly and neatly. He was harmless, and would often expand his eyes when he was spoken to, as if he, himself, couldn’t believe he was worth the attention. It was easy to see why he took a liking to Pam. She was a great actress and could fake emotions perfectly.

She made him feel powerful and important.

All the things he didn’t believe about himself.

Darren laid the Daddy stuff on real quick and real thick. When he found out I was into books, he set up an entire library in his living room. He would often take me on spontaneous shopping sprees and hold my hand.

“Would you like that, Jethy?” At first, his lisp embarrassed me. Then, I grew to like it.

I would nod.

“Then it’s yourth.”

He would actively try to engage with me in conversations every time we sat at the dinner table, and when I brought up the subject of wanting to visit my dad’s grave, and Pam almost fell over, Darren was there to tell her that it was a good idea. He was even there to buy the Kit Kat I wanted to place on Dad’s grave, a token for all the Kit Kats we’d shared at the bus stop every morning while we waited. Me, for the bus to take me to school. Him, for the bus taking him to work.

“Two for you, two for me.”

“But you’re bigger, Daddy.”

“Which means that you are growing. Remember: the journey is always better than the destination.”

I’d been reluctantly happy. How could you not be, when you move from a two-bedroom apartment in Anaheim to a mansion in Todos Santos and get a brand-new wardrobe and built-in dad who tries really, really hard to fill the impossibly large shoes your real one left behind? It wasn’t Darren’s fault that we’d been injected into each other’s life artificially. And it definitely wasn’t his fault that I missed my real dad like an inner organ you couldn’t function without.

Darren only had one vice. Just the one. And we were so accustomed to it from living with Dad for so many years that it blended into our lives like an ugly piece of furniture that’s an heirloom from a dead loved one.

Every now and then, he would come back home from a business trip fuming. Anger issues didn’t begin to cover his mood. But, like Dad, he always spared us his wrath. The first time he’d stormed into the house with face like thunder was scary. Then again, he went straight to his office upstairs and didn’t leave there for two days straight. It was odd, to say the least, but by no means terrible. When he finally came out, he was calm, serene, and polite. “I’m thorry I lost it. I’d found out that I invested a lot of money in a hotel that is not going to be built in the next ten years. It was wrong, and it won’t happen again.” He would smooth his wrinkly tie.

Only it did happen again. And again. And then a-freaking-gain. I’d tried to block it out. It wasn’t like he took it out on Mom or me. I sometimes heard him screaming at people on the phone—lispless, like losing his mind came with gaining his demeanor—but he was always soft-spoken when he talked to us. One time, a man came over to our estate a day after the anger started. A grandpa-looking lawyer in high-belted pants. I watched them from my bedroom window. Darren nearly punched him square in the face.

Darren only ever screwed up once, but that time was enough to tilt my whole world on its axis and rewrite the pages of my history and future. I really loved hanging out in Darren’s office. I knew it was forbidden—it wasn’t for me to enter and use—but I still liked it. He had three laptops, a library consisting of thousands of books, most of them untouched. “They look good, don’t they?” he bragged once. “The interior dethigner really put an effort into buying all the clathics.” It felt like a dark cave where I could be alone with my thoughts, the words. With Pushkin.

It was the time he came back from Honduras. I’d been in his office, lying on the deep green velvet couch, a Jane Austen book draped over my chest. I’d been sleeping. It was well after three in the morning.

Darren stormed in, slamming the door shut after him. I perked up immediately. He had a bottle in his hand. He never had a bottle in his hand. Vodka. I recognized the scent immediately, because it reminded me of my dad. I slid the Jane Austen book back to its place above my head, tucking my hair behind my ear.

He turned around. Noticed me.

“Hello, Jesse.”

He didn’t have a lisp, and that worried me. It told me I was getting a Darren I didn’t know. Darren who didn’t necessarily want to be my dad.