Page 143 of Creeping Beautiful

It’s time to give her the truth.

But it’s not McKay looking back up at me from the bottom of the stairs.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN - ADAM

PRESENT DAY

I want to believe that people are good. I want to cling hard to the idea that trust, and loyalty, and love are all that matter. I want to have faith in the life we created with Indie and the way we raised and supported her.

I want her to be strong, and resilient, and safe.

And if you had asked me the day after her twentieth birthday if I still believed all that stuff, I would’ve said yes.

Hell, if you had asked me a month later or even a year later, I’d still have said yes.

But four years?

My convictions are wavering.

It’s not even that I’m afraid I don’t know her anymore. It’s this sudden fear that I never did. That we got her all wrong.

The best-case scenario being we simply misunderstood her. We missed something. Some critical hidden component that, once applied to her treatment, will patch things up well enough for her to keep going. For us to stand by her.

But it’s the worst-case scenario that scares me.

What if… what if this is just who she is?

What if, no matter how well we nurture her, she is just bad?

I’ve heard it go both ways.

Evil people are born.

Evil people are made.

I need someone to offer up a definitive answer in this regard. I need some fucking assurance that what happened was a one-time thing.

But not even James Fenici could give me that piece of mind. The last thing he said to me when we parted ways four years ago was… It’s a hard lesson to learn, but not everyone’s worth saving.

I get that. Probably better than most. But how do you know? Where is that line? The one that tells you when it’s time to give up and move on?

This is what I think about the whole drive up to Old Home. Because I have to know. I can’t give up on Indie unless I know for sure she’s gone and there’s no way to save her.

I made a promise to myself that day back on the island. I promised to protect her. To never let that snake get that close again. And I’m not really talking about snakes. We lived in the middle of the fucking swamp with so many snakes all around us, we were practically trippin’ over them.

None of this ever had anything to do with the snakes.

It was about the garden.

And the gate.

And the ignorance we cultivated inside those walls.

Her ignorance. Her secrets.

And mine too.

And finally, one day, it all caught up with us and we were squeezed, and crushed, and eaten when her veil of ignorance was lifted and her secret snakes finally came crawling out of the walls be built around her.