Page 61 of Pretty Nightmare

I write in this book every single night now. That’s not how I did the journals of my past. Those were for coping. That’s why Donovan used to give them to me. So I could write down the things I couldn’t say. But we had a stipulation that when they were all filled up, we had to sit down and read them together and talk it out. It was all part of keeping me intact and sane.

And then we would burn them.

I’m not going to go on a tangent and say this is convenient or suspicious. Even though it’s both.

It’s just a fact, Dear Indie. That’s all. I wrote in the journals. We discussed the journals. And then we burned the journals.

Period. New line.

This journal will not be burned at the end. There isn’t a chance in hell of that. But Adam is right. Truth needs to be treated with respect. So I don’t write anything about the old days in here. There are no sentences about jobs, or regrets, or mistakes.

This is a book of hope. It’s a book about slow days and easy nights. It’s book about me, and us, and this place. It’s a story of three men and two little girls. And how things change over time, and get better, or worse, and then no matter what happens, they go on.

I hope it has a happy ending. I want more than anything to get to the last page of this journal and make the very last words in this book be that they lived happily ever after.

But I’m not stupid. I understand how fairytales work.

You have to live a million disappointments.

Crush a billion evil dragons.

Face a trillion moments of crisis.

And even then, there is no promise.

CHAPTER ELEVEN - DONOVAN

FOUR YEARS AGO

TEN SLEEP, WYOMING

From the view at the end of her long driveway Anabelle Avery’s log cabin appears minimalistic. Just four walls, a small porch with two Adirondack chairs slightly angled towards each other, and white curtains billowing through the one window on the front side.

This is a relief.

When she told me that she opened up a spiritual healing center in Wyoming on a twenty-eight-thousand-acre lot of land I pictured… I don’t know. A lodge, I guess. Something with a massive wood-beamed drive-through portico out front and a door that leads to a well-staffed lobby.

But this? This is nice. Quaint.

Which is normal for Ana. She is—and I’m not being disparaging in any way when I use these words to describe her, they are just part of her charm—she is earthy. And soft.

You know the type. Likes those floaty gauze shirts and long chiffon skirts. Keeps pink crystals in her pockets in case she needs grounding. And wears flowers in her long, light brown hair.

Kind of… boho.

But she is not stupid, or flighty, or gullible. Anabelle is the first girl I met after I moved to LA when the Company fell five years ago. I was just switching over to reconstructive surgery and she was finishing up her PhD in cognitive neuroscience. It was one of those burn-too-bright relationships because she left right after successfully defending her thesis in the spring quarter of my first year to open up her healing center.

She is rich as rich comes. I’m talking old, East Coast money. Not Company. That was the first thing I checked. My family was in charge of the care and feeding of the Company pedigree book, which I inherited after my grandfather’s suicide when everything fell apart.

So unless she’s using a fake name—always a possibility, but highly unlikely in this case—Ana Avery is the real deal.

And I love her.

Not love love, though we did a lot of fucking back in the day. It’s a different kind of love. Maybe like the love McKay has for Indie, minus the whole training her to kill thing.

She is six years older than me but she makes me feel ten years older than her when we’re together.

I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not. But I don’t mind it. I went through life as the kid who didn’t really belong anywhere. Too smart, too young, too weird, too rich, too secretive.