Page 104 of The Dearly Departed

“Yeah. Tell me a story.”

“About what?” I asked, exasperated.

"Anything. Something from your childhood."

"I had a fucking shitty childhood."

"So did I," she replied with a smile. "But not all of it was bad. I bet you have something good too."

I wanted to laugh at the thought that there could be anything good in a childhood filled with abandonment, abuse, neglect, and rape. Even my most precious memories were tainted with horrible stains time could never hope to remove.

“Come on,” she encouraged me, poking the needle again through my skin and pulling the thread tight. “Think. There has to be something.”

"I met my best friend," I muttered, grasping for anything to dull the pain in my leg. "He's like a brother to me now."

"Well, that's nice," she said, her tone bright. “What’s he like?”

With my eyes closed, I pictured Shawn. The scrawny blond-haired kid he’d once been. The man he was now. We used to tell each other everything. He still told me everything. But the distance I’d forced between us since my days as a contracted killer had begun weighed on me now, and I longed for the way things had once been.

“He’s, um …” I cleared my throat. “He’s smart. Honestly, he’s probably one of the smartest people I’ve ever known. He knows so much about computers, and he’s very interested in the medical field. The guy should’ve been a doctor. He could’ve been, if we hadn’t been—”

I’m saying too much.

Once again, I cleared my throat. “Anyway … he’s a good guy. One of the best I’ve ever known.”

“He sounds nice,” she whispered, her voice hushed.

I allowed myself to smile, despite the sadness in my soul. “He is.”

"I didn't keep in touch with anybody from the foster homes I was in.”

"Yeah," I murmured absent-mindedly as my vision focused again on that painting across the room, and with it came the phantom face of a little girl I wished I’d kept in touch with.

A little girl who had relied on me.

A little girl who had looked at me like I could protect her from the worst of this world … and I'd failed.

I thought about the two little girls I’d hopefully saved earlier that night, and I wished I could’ve done the same thing for Anna. I wished I could look back and know that, while I had suffered, she had turned out all right.

"What are you thinking about?" Analise asked after a few minutes of silence.

"One of the other kids I met," I replied, shutting my eyes again just to try, try, try and remember.

Her gap-toothed smile as I pushed her on the swing at the playground.

The way she huddled against me as I read her stories at the library.

How she tiptoed into the room I shared with Ike and Shawn to crawl into my bed when she was scared during thunderstorms.

I wished I could've taken her with us. I wished she could've been with us now.

"What happened to him … or her?"

"We were separated," I replied, my voice clipped with tension. “Something … really bad happened, and that was the last time we saw each other.”

Analise was quiet as she worked, sewing me up. She seemed deep in thought, her mouth set in a terse line, her brows tipped with melancholy.

"What happened to your parents?" she then asked.