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“Woke up when she heard me screaming. By that point, my mother, who was almost unconscious on the floor…I don’t know. I guess her maternal instinct kicked in when she saw him hit me. Somehow, she got up and hit him with a glass vase from the coffee table. Knocked the bastard out cold.” Chills ran over my skin, forcing all the hairs on my arms and my neck to stand on end as the memories flooded me.
It was all momentarily real—the anger, the pain, the adrenaline.
Until Dahlia touched my face, and it all disappeared.
“I’m so sorry.”
“You didn’t do it,” I said wryly. “My mother called the police. Turned out Roy had been on the run from an incident several years earlier in another state and was living under an alias. He was arrested and convicted of a bunch of counts of abuse, attempted murder on my mom, and an actual murder charge from somewhere else. He’ll never get out of prison, if he’s even still alive.”
“Wow. So, what happened? Did you move back in with your dad?”
I nodded, taking her hand as it fell onto my lap. “It was only supposed to be temporary,” I said, threading my fingers through hers. “My parents hadn’t been together for years, but Dad had never seen anyone else, they’d never divorced, and he had apparently realized that Mom needed something to do other than be a parent.”
“What about Perrie?”
“He adopted her at Mom’s request. It was a fight, legally speaking. I think Roy dropped his claim to his daughter in exchange for my parents paying his legal fees.”
“Again, wow.”
She didn’t need to say that twice. “Yes. It all seemed better after that. A couple years later, my youngest sister, Penelope, was born. Nobody had to say it, but she was the angel. Dad loved her more than anything—something that made it awkward for Perrie. She’d tried to be perfect for him, but I guess that all my dad saw when he looked at her was a mistake. I held some childish bitterness toward her because if she didn’t exist, my parents never would have broken up.”
“Maybe they would have.”
“Of course. But in my young mind, she was the cause of that. That changed over the years, though. The older Penelope got, the more she was idolized by my father. I was pushed away, and he became crueler and crueler to Perrie. My mom suffered from depression because of what Roy had done to her, and occasionally, she’d spend time in the hospital to heal the wounds. Dad took some of the blame for her, realizing he’d pushed her toward him, even if he didn’t know it then, but that didn’t make it better for my sister.”
My heart panged every time I said Perrie’s name. I missed all the women in my family—I’d lost them all so quickly, but she was maybe the one I missed the most.
“I became Perrie’s protector pretty quickly. She was tiny and quiet—as shy as one person could possibly be. I got into many verbal fights with my father over his treatment of her. He would tell me the same thing all the time. That, if it weren’t for her, my mother wouldn’t be crazy and I wouldn’t have this scar.”
“In the nicest way possible, your dad sounds like one of the cruelest men I’ve ever heard of.”
I wished I could tell her she was wrong.
“He didn’t—doesn’t—deal with emotions well. It’s where I get it from.” I squeezed her hand. “Around the time Penelope hit her teens, my mom got better. It was as though she felt she could finally live again, and Dad let her back into the business. She looked after the girls at her favorite club, which was Foxies. She relished in it. With both our parents out of the house a lot, I did a lot of watching over my sisters. Which wasn’t easy—I was working part-time for Dad since I’d just graduated, and those hours steadily increased until I was working almost as much as he was.
“Luckily, by that point, Penelope was sixteen and didn’t need to be watched anymore. In theory,” I added dryly. “If she hadn’t been so perfect in the eyes of my parents, maybe they would have noticed that she was the biggest fuck-up of the three of us.”
Dahlia’s eyebrows shot up, but she didn’t say anything.
“She could have shot someone in front of them and they would have blamed the gun.” Once again, my tone was tinged with bitterness, but I didn’t care. It was the fucking honest truth. “While I was busting my ass helping Dad run the business and getting criticized for bringing him coffee a degree too cold, and Perrie was working in the office, Penelope was out doing crazy shit. Drinking, drugs, hanging out with the wrong crowds.”
