Prologue
Rosemary
Two years old and abandoned.
By your own mother.
Dad always said she was depressed. It wasn’t our fault. That having two children was simply too much for the unstable woman to handle. Yet, I can’t help but think everything was fine—before me.
I’ve seen the pictures that Dad tried to hide in albums he kept in his cedar chest at the end of his bed. Pictures of the three of them. All smiling. Happy. Complete. Willa’s strawberry-blonde hair was an exact match to that of Dad’s. My father, the man who saved my mother from an abusive trailer in Houston and married her into a middle class suburb that was safe. Safe from the hateful past and darkness that bled, black and dirty, down her family tree. In those pictures, you could see she was every bit the damsel no longer in distress that had been saved by her pure prince, with his eyes bluer than any sea. Mom gazed upon my sister in those pictures as if the tiny replica of my father was an angel sent right from heaven. A free pass from the darkness that always shadowed her.
Everything was perfect in their little world.
Until she delivered me.
I came into this world premature, screaming, and completely unmanageable. My dark hair and almost black eyes mimicked that of my mother’s. It was clear that her past had come back to haunt her. And suddenly, her perfect world had been turned upside down by a child that was clearly a spawn of Satan himself.
Every picture thereafter of my mother had been unhappy. While Willa and Dad grinned innocently for the pictures, Mom and I glared as if the camera had the ability to reveal the wickedness that seemed to saturate our souls.
Three weeks after my second birthday, when Willa was just ten, Mom emerged from her bedroom carrying a pink suitcase Dad had gotten her for Christmas. She calmly pulled the fish sticks out of the oven and divvied them up between her two girls. I’d whined about wanting chicken, not fish, and she simply nodded her head—as if to herself—and told us not to leave the house until Dad got home.
Around six, when our father came home and discovered the “Dear John” note on his dresser in the bedroom, we learned Mom had bailed. At two, I didn’t understand. But at sixteen, I understand clearly.
She hated me and the very fact I reminded her of herself. The black, gloomy world she’d come from. And she couldn’t bear to be reminded of her own father. So she took the easy way out and left all three of us.
Luckily for Willa and me, Dad was a better mom than she could have ever dreamed of being. He loved us more than we deserved and provided for us in every way he could. I adored my Dad. When Willa married Tate four years ago and flew the coup, Dad and I grew even closer.
Everything was fine, until my fifteenth birthday.
Willa and Tate were coming for dinner. Dad had made my favorite, homemade chicken Alfredo pizza. And he’d even let me open my present early. The drawing pads and charcoal pencils, while not expensive, were exactly what I wanted. I wasn’t that good yet, but I loved creating images that seemed to be a reflection of the nefarious soul that lived within me—a piece of my mother that lived on through me. By sketching out those black and white smoky images, I felt as if I were removing parts of her that were so intricately threaded within me.
Life was pretty much perfect.
Until it wasn’t.
Until the exact moment that my world turned upside down.
Twenty-seven Xanax will kill someone if they take them all at once. Especially when they chase them with a fifth of Jack.
I should know.
That lovely concoction killed my father.
I remember pulling the pizza from the oven and hollering for Dad. And Willa had just texted to tell me they were ten minutes away. When he didn’t answer my calls, I found my father blue on the bathroom floor. Apparently, he was done internalizing the pain of our mother leaving him—a pain he hid so well, but it clearly ate him away from the inside. The note was simple and sweet, just like Dad.
My Willa and Rose, I love you and I’m sorry I wasn’t strong enough to be the father you both deserved.
The doctors tried and failed to save my father.
Just like now.
They’re failing to save my sister.
I’m not sure what I did to deserve losing everyone I loved. For the past year, my sister has tried desperately at the young age of twenty-four to be everyone for me. Father, mother, and big sister.
But my wickedness seems to have poisoned her as well.
It started out as being sick to her stomach. We’d even secretly hoped her and Tate were finally pregnant. But she grew sicker and sicker. My sister, ever the stubborn one, refused to be seen by a doctor.
It’s just a bug, she’d promised.
It’ll pass, she’d said.
Tate and I begged for her to go. It wasn’t until in a twisted repeat of history, I found her lying in her own vomit on the bathroom floor. Her skin as blue as Dad’s was. Thankfully, we managed to get her to the hospital.
Since then, she’s had seven seizures.
Seven in three days.
And the stupid doctor does nothing.
“Hey, sugar,” one of the nurses flirts with someone behind me as she approaches, “he’s with a patient but will be in his office after.”
Some guy walks past me and I catch a whiff of his cologne. Clean and too manly for a boy who looks like he’s still in college. If I weren’t worrying over my sister, I’d be ogling anything and everything from the opposite sex, including this guy that strides past me and then disappears down a corridor to the right. That’s kind of my thing. Gushing over boys. “Boy Crazy” is what Tate and Willa had called me and then laughed about it over dinner one night.
Living with my sister and her husband, my now legal guardians, hasn’t been too bad. Tate works long hours but has always been kind to me. He and Willa had even paid for me to take art classes at the community center after school twice a week.
Again, life had almost been perfect.
Now, I’m waiting for it all to come crashing down on top of me.
If this life takes yet another person I love away, I won’t have anyone left.
A soft click indicates Tate emerging from her hospital room and I lift my gaze to find the red, teary eyes of my brother-in-law.
“Rose…” he chokes out and then pinches the bridge of his nose as a sob wracks through him.
Tears stream down over my cheeks and I shake my head. “No, Tate. Please.”
He opens his arms to me, and I run into them. “I’m sorry, honey. So, so, sorry.”
We cry together for what seems like hours, clutching onto one another.
Tate Cantrell is all I have left in this world.
I wonder how long until he’s gone too…