Chapter One
Lily
7 weeks ago
Bang. Bang.
The sound of gunshots burst through my eardrums. Everything was a blur in the darkness and the loud barrage of bullets had slightly deadened my hearing, but I could faintly hear a woman screaming in the distance. Stop! No! she shrieked. Over and over, she screamed and screamed.
No…wait. It wasn’t only her. I could hear two women shouting now, not just one. One was angry. The other petrified. Begging for her life. The angry one sounded familiar—a lot like me. Mommy. I’d always been told that I took after her, so it was no wonder that we had such similar voices.
It’s okay. This isn’t real, I told myself. It’s only a dream.
But it was still all too real. Deep in my dream state, I knew what was happening; which real-life nightmare I was reliving. But then it changed. My environment morphed. This time I wasn’t simply imagining how the horrible incident played out in the deep recesses of my slumbering mind. I was actually there. It was my voice shouting angrily, not my mother’s. It was me pulling the trigger, shooting in the air to scare the other woman. Then it was me pulling the trigger again, only this time the pistol was aimed at her face.
Bang.
I pulled the trigger three more times.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
The sound of the gunshots began to change to something harsher, shriller. Beep, beep, beep. I awoke with a start to realize that my alarm clock was bleeping in my ear, and I groaned and snoozed it before burying my face under my pillow, trying to erase the awful nightmare from my mind. But I couldn’t. I wasn’t like other people who could just forget a bad dream.
Especially when the dream was based on reality.
You wouldn’t know there was anything wrong with me or my life just by looking at me. I didn’t look damaged. I didn’t look broken. I looked average. Perfectly, boringly average. I had average hair, an average face, I dressed in ‘normal’ clothing, and I was only just below the average height. Basically what I’m saying is, you probably wouldn’t notice me if you saw me across the street, and you certainly wouldn’t think, ‘oh wow, that girl definitely has a fucked up life’.
But I did.
My life had been touched by many people in many ways over the years, but everything paled in comparison to the events of several years ago, when I was still barely a teen. See, not many people had a criminal mother on the lam. A murderer mom, to be more specific. Yeah, you read that right. My mother killed someone in cold blood and then ran away to hide and evade capture, and I still thought about it every day.
Especially today, on the six year anniversary of the crime.
My alarm clock bleeped in my ear again, and I grudgingly slapped it until it shut up, then swung my legs over the edge of my bed. I had a business class this morning at college, but I was hardly up for it. I’d barely slept a wink all night. Of course, I still had to go anyway. I wasn’t one of those lazy students who mooched around all day and skipped class to smoke weed on the main lawn on campus outside the library. I went to class, did my research, wrote my papers, and I came home most nights instead of partying with the rest of the co-eds. Most people would call me boring. But like I said, I preferred the word ‘average’. It was less offensive, less grating on my psyche.
After showering and getting dressed, I checked my cell phone. My friend Alexandra had texted me to ask how I was and if I was coming to class today—she knew about the whole ‘anniversary’ thing—and I smiled despite my somber mood as I shot off a response. It was always the little things in life that helped you, right? A text from a well-meaning friend. A cute little cupcake with pink sprinkles. A nice cup of coffee.
Speaking of coffee….god, did I need one. I ambled slowly into the kitchen, still feeling like a zombie, and I called out as I hunted down the pods for the espresso machine. “Dad? If you’re here, I’m making coffee. Want one?”
Silence.
Not exactly surprising. My father was rarely around these days. Honestly, if there wasn’t an entire row of family photos hanging in the hallway, I’d probably forget what he looked like. He was always at work, struggling to keep his housing construction company going, and while I couldn’t blame him for that, it didn’t change the fact that I felt like I barely knew him anymore, and vice versa. I couldn’t remember the last time he asked me a question about myself. I guess that’s just what happened when you came from a broken home. Families didn’t just recover from trauma, at least not all the time. It followed them around, haunted them.
That was the best word for it. Haunted. I felt haunted.
It didn’t help that I still lived at home, where every room and every little picture and memento made me think of my killer mom. She was like a ghost that followed me around whenever I was here. I couldn’t afford to move out yet, so that wasn’t going to change anytime soon, but damn…to put things bluntly, it really sucked sometimes.
I stirred two sugars into my coffee and then wandered down the hall which led to our small home office. I had a paper due today, and I’d finished it and printed it off last night. All I had to do was stick it in my bag, finish my coffee, and then I’d be ready to head to class.
Stopping in my tracks halfway down the hall, I frowned as I looked down. Something white had caught my eye, and my heart dropped into my shoes as I realized what it was. Seashells. They must’ve fallen out of one of the frames that hung on the wall of this particular hallway.
Mom and Dad had framed them for me when I was about eight years old, after one of our annual beach trips. I’d always loved walking along the sand and finding pretty shells, and I especially loved the little ones you could occasionally find that had holes in them. I’d collect a bunch of them and slip a piece of string through all the holes, and voila—instant shell necklace. I even tried to start my own little shell jewelry business, but as you can imagine, my only customer was my mom, who happily bought every little piece I made and kept them in her jewelry box at home.
You’re just like your daddy, Lily, she used to say. You’ve got a mind for business. You’re just a bit young right now, that’s all. That’s why no one else at the beach bought your necklaces. But I believe in you, and I’ll always support you.
A lump formed in my throat as I remembered those words, and I stooped down to pick up the broken shells off the floorboards. This particular hallway was quite narrow, and my dad occasionally bumped the frames on the wall with his broad shoulders if he walked too far to the left, as he often did when he was absentmindedly walking around with his nose buried in the newspaper or this quarter’s financial reports from his company. That was probably how these shells had fallen out of the picture frame. It wasn’t his fault, though. He didn’t mean to do it. He didn’t realize how much those silly little mementos still meant to me. That was all on me, because I never spoke to him about it. Never told him how bad I still felt about everything that’d happened back then.
My phone chirped in my pocket again, snapping me out of my reverie. It was another text from Alexandra. You sure you want to come today? I totally get it if you want to bail. We could go shopping, catch a movie somewhere. Anything to distract you, babe! Xx.
I picked myself and my coffee up from the floor and made my way into the home office, trying to think of a reply to the text. I would’ve dearly loved to skip class and have a girly day with my friend to pull myself out of the haze, but I also needed to get this paper into the submission box. I had to go to class to do that, and I didn’t want to lose five percent of my grade for handing it in late.
I’ll be fine, I ended up replying after I sat down at my desk. I’ll see you at the lecture. Xox.
As I rifled through the papers on the desk, trying to remember where I’d put the exact ones that I needed to hand in, I glanced up as I stifled another yawn. The window was open and the air outside was clear and sunny, giving me a perfect view of the house behind ours, just across the small field that separated our properties. It was a huge white ranch-style house, much bigger than ours, and I squinted and stared as a familiar face popped into view in the distance.
Jackson Barker.
My heart began to pound at the sight of him, for more than one reason.
Jackson had been our neighbor for fifteen years. Well, sort of. His house wasn’t directly next to ours, given the nature of the semi-rural area we lived in, but it was close enough that we could see it from ours through the back windows. Seeing as he and Dad were best friends once upon a time, I’d spent a lot of time at that house as a kid. See, our place was pretty small and cramped compared to his—Jackson was very well-off—and we didn’t have a pool. As such, he’d always welcomed us at his place in the summer when we weren’t off on our annual beach trip, and I’d spent a lot of time playing in the pool with my mom and his girlfriend Jenna while he barbecued with Dad. It was all so fun and relaxing.
Until it wasn’t.
I still remembered the day things really started to fall apart. Friendships didn’t always last, I knew that, but this wasn’t a case of people simply drifting apart. This was…different. More insidious. As I grew older, I noticed more and more that my mom simply didn’t like Jenna anymore, and the feeling seemed to be mutual. I’d never noticed when I was younger, but Jenna liked to make snide comments. About me. About Mom. About Dad. Even about Jackson on rare occasions. Pretty much everyone in her life. They were always veiled insults, so it was hard to respond, but they had their effect. Simply and crudely put, she was a passive-aggressive bitch.
As Jenna’s attitude toward everyone worsened, we started going over there to visit less and less. But that wasn’t what caused things to fall apart. No, this story went much deeper than that.
My mom had suffered from anxiety for many years, and her old therapist had even suggested she might be suffering from something more serious—a condition called borderline personality disorder. I didn’t know much about it, but I’d heard her arguing about it with Dad many times over the years, and I remembered how exasperated he would get when she continually denied that anything was wrong with her. But there obviously was something wrong. She would work herself up into these states for no reason, and some days she’d refuse to get out of bed. Sometimes she would sit in the lounge and stare into space for hours. Other times she’d fly into rages before descending into a full-blown panic attack. It was always hard to predict how she would be on a certain day, but I’d always known it wasn’t her fault. She didn’t mean to be like that, and she’d never, ever directed her bad moods at me. So don’t get me wrong, she was always a damn good mother to me. At least she had been when she was still around.
Before she snapped.
One night when I was thirteen, we went out to dinner. Jackson and Jenna had just so happened to be at the same restaurant, and when we arrived and saw them, Mom absolutely lost it. She marched right over to their table and poured a glass of wine on Jenna’s head, and while Jenna spluttered and wiped herself off, Mom started screaming at her about how she ‘knew she was sleeping with her husband’ and ‘was acting like a home-wrecking whore’.
It was a real spectacle, and horribly mortifying. None of us even knew what she was raving about, and she was clearly delusional. Jenna might’ve been a bit of a bitch, but she seemed pretty happy with Jackson overall, and there was simply no reason or evidence to believe my mother’s claims. My dad had always been a devoted husband and father as well—I’d never once witnessed him sneaking around or saying and doing anything untoward—and I knew that those kind of accusations being leveled at him had absolutely devastated him at the time. He’d stayed quiet and tried to defuse the situation when it happened, though, no matter how broken he felt, and he’d profusely apologized to Jenna, Jackson and the restaurant staff once he managed to get Mom out of the place. Then he calmly and quietly attempted to convince her to start seeing her therapist again, but that only served to make her withdraw into herself, and she’d locked herself in the spare bedroom for three days straight, refusing to talk to anyone. Even me.
After that incident, the friendship between my dad and Jackson obviously became strained. Jackson knew my father would never betray him by having an affair with his girlfriend—we all knew my mother had essentially lost her mind at this point and made the whole thing up in her head—but it was hard to maintain a close friendship when their significant others hated each other’s guts. They still tried, though, and one month later, Jackson had offered to help out with some tax-related stuff at Dad’s company when things weren’t going so well for the business.
While they were doing that late into the day, my mother decided to go to Jackson’s house with a gun. She shot Jenna in the head, killing her instantly. Then she shot her three more times in the abdomen for good measure. The police investigators called it overkill—something people did when they were angry. Beyond angry. Or just crazy.
The entire case in the gun had been spent, and there were two bullets lodged in the ceiling, meaning Mom had likely scared Jenna by firing a couple of warning shots before shooting her four times. After that, she dropped the gun, hastily packed up some of her things from our own house, and then she took her car and cleared out her bank accounts. Then she vanished, and that was that. That was the story of my family’s demise. Our heartbreak. My mom was a crazy person and a murderer, and she was never coming back. No matter how much she’d always claimed to love me, she decided to abandon our family and hide from the truth of what she’d done, rather than face up to it and spend the rest of her life in prison or a mental hospital for the criminally insane.
I would never know exactly why she did what she did. I could barely reconcile my previous image of her as a loving mother with the person she’d become. I also couldn’t make her understand how it felt to be me after the murder, because she chose to disappear and spend the rest of her life without me in it. So it was hard. Really freaking hard. I’d suffered from anxiety issues for years afterwards, and I knew I probably also suffered from some sort of abandonment issues.
But I had to press on with my life. No matter how much I adored my mom as a kid, I didn’t want to turn out the way she did, and so I’d had a regular therapist for years, and that helped me keep the demons at bay. With her help, I’d developed routines to keep me busy—always going to class, always studying a set amount of hours per day at home, always going to bed at the same time. Things like that helped distract me from old trauma and new anxieties, and while I’d probably never feel normal, I knew I was at least stable.
Stable and average. Boring. Ha.
I sighed and kept watching Jackson out of the window, staring with fascination. I hadn’t seen him in person since I was about fifteen, even though he hadn’t moved after the murder. I knew he worked a lot, so he always got up and left very early and returned very late. I guess he was also careful to avoid being seen by either me or my father, because no one wanted to deal with that horrible awkwardness or the painful thoughts that would no doubt surface if we ever made eye contact again.
Usually when I thought of him, my mind would fill with very specific things. Jackson. Dad’s best friend. Well, Dad’s ex-best friend. Kinda hard to stay friends with someone after your wife murdered his girlfriend. But today was different. I hadn’t seen him in a long time, and now that I was much older than I was last time I saw him, I noticed something else about him.
He wasn’t just a guy who lived near us. He wasn’t just my dad’s old best friend.
He was…hot.
In fact, he was drop-dead gorgeous. He was tall and muscular with a leading-man chiseled jawline, strong brow and dark tousled hair. Wow. How had I never noticed how handsome he was before? It wasn’t like he’d changed drastically. He’d always looked the same. I’d just never really seen him. Not properly.
I guess the last time I saw him from the back window, I’d barely been pubescent. I was a late bloomer, so even at fifteen when some of my friends were filling out and already thinking about sex, I was still totally flat-chested and dreaming of having a pony. Without all those hormones flooding my body, I’d been able to view Jackson in the same innocent way I always had as a child before all the drama happened. He’d simply been Dad’s awesome friend who I loved to see.
But boy, I loved to see him even more now….now that I’d finally realized how damn sexy he was.
Reality suddenly hit me like a cold slap in the face, and I snapped my eyes shut and turned away, deeply ashamed at the way my mind was working right now. This was wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. I couldn’t be having these sorts of feelings. There was too much history here. Awful history. My mother murdered Jackson’s girlfriend, for god’s sake. Standing here and thinking about how hot he was seemed really messed up.
Besides, even if it weren’t for all that, he was twenty years my senior. There was no way I could ever touch a man so much older than me. Not because I didn’t want to, but because I knew a mature man who had his shit together wouldn’t go near me. I was still just a little girl, essentially. Nineteen and a virgin, still in college. I wasn’t even close to having my shit together. Especially not like he did—he was a city councilman, successful business owner and prominent candidate in the current race for our state’s next two US senators.
A true powerful man.
Sighing, I turned back to the window, unable to help myself from looking again. I watched Jackson walk over to his car and unlock it, and my insides sighed and tingled as I noticed the way his dark, expensively-cut suit jacket stretched across his shoulders. He’d always dressed nicely. Maturely. I still existed purely in T-shirts, sundresses and cutoffs. God, I felt like such a baby compared to him.
I wondered if there was anyone new in his life. Anyone since Jenna. A handsome, wealthy man like him surely attracted a lot of women, but I knew he was still unmarried—the local paper had done a profile on him the other week for the senator’s race—and he didn’t have any children, either. I had no idea why. I’d always thought he’d make a great dad. Better than my own, anyway. My dad had been a good parent back in the day, but like I said earlier, things had changed since my mother did what she did. Dad was never around nowadays, and he barely knew me anymore. Barely cared for me, it seemed. He just didn’t have time, what with the struggling business and all. I’d practically raised myself through my teen years as a result. I didn’t blame Dad; I understood why he was the way he was now.
I could easily imagine Jackson being a good father, though. I could picture him pushing a kid on a swing, or teaching him or her to play baseball in the spacious backyard. He’d make that child feel safe, protected, loved; the opposite of how I felt nowadays with my own messed up life.
God, what I wouldn’t do to have a big strong man take care of me like that for once…
A man like Jackson.
A fresh set of tears welled up in my eyes, and I wiped them away as Jackson started his car and pulled out of his driveway, heading closely by our place on his way out to the main road. I quickly ducked down. I couldn’t let him see me. Couldn’t dredge up old memories, tear open old wounds. I had to hide, had to make sure we never got close enough for him to notice me, even though we lived within walking distance. Even though I so desperately wanted him back in my life, just like in the old days when he’d practically been a family member; almost like a second father.
But I couldn’t, and I wouldn’t. It was better this way.
I only needed one daddy.