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A twisted obsession envenomed by hate.
Rafe was still looking at the screen with a twisted expression. In profile, he was like a crisper image of his father: a sharper jaw, a more defined nose. Everything in high resolution and all the more devastating because of it.
She had been asking herself who could hate her this much. Whose obsession would drive them to such deliberately psychopathic extremes. But now she feared she might have her answer—
A man who had already proven that he would stop at nothing to get what he wanted.
???????
She went out that night.
She didn’t tell him where she was going when he asked. She just disappeared into her room long enough to see to her dog and change her clothes, before clicking out in those little bat heels.
The door slammed behind her, rattling the windows.
A few minutes later, he heard the growl of her car’s engine.
This was exactly what she did, though. She didn’t explode; she ran like hell, blazing a hot trail of flame on her own path to destruction. If you got too close, you got burned. But if you stood at just the right distance, the glow was warm and the view was spectacular.
But here, and now, it might get her killed.
Rafe replayed the video of his stepmother and father, but his eyes weren’t taking in the images. He kept thinking about the letters. Those fucking letters. Written in a moment of agony, when his heart felt as if it was being gnawed at by a parasitic worm intent on consuming him whole.
Nobody had ever told him that some things, once said, could bleed into the soul like indelible ink and then never come out again. It was a hard lesson, painful.
Losing her again would be more painful still.
When his entire world was crumbling, words were all he had to brick everything back together. And like a brick, sometimes the heft of them combined with potent fury made for a tempting weapon. He had thrown everything he’d had at her, hoping to wound. And now, finally, he had.
Graham Greene had once famously said that authors ought to be detached, that they carried a splinter of ice in their hearts as they watched and listened to their surroundings with the callous impartiality of scientists observing animals in laboratory cages.
That splinter had always been inside of him, and whenever emotion made it melt—as it did now—he could feel the pain of its absence like a fresh, raw wound.
He could accept that his biological parents were flawed beings, incapable of the love he had never thought to ask for or even allow himself to want. But for some reason, whenever Donni pulled away from him, her actions pierced right to the dark, living core of him where even the ice itself dared not tread, and he resented her for it in a way that he had never quite resented either of his parents for similar or worse transgressions, because when they did it, it didn’t hurt the same.
Rafe stared at the new laptop stonily, willing it to give up its secrets. When the screen remained stubbornly black, with the video set to play, he brutally yanked out the flashdrive.
The file window disappeared in a flash, leaving the empty explorer window.
This was some sick shit. He knew they should take it to the police, but he wasn’t sure what they could do about it. The officers handling her case were incompetent or indifferent by turns, and he knew Donni would hate him even more if he went behind her back.
Something had changed briefly at dinner last night. She had softened towards him, just slightly, and he had a very faint glimpse of a possible future between them.
But then this morning, whatever had changed had abruptly changed black. He had felt the flip of it like a slap in the face. Or a door slamming closed.
Thingshadbeen good between them once. Back when he’d been younger, and she had felt more like a playmate or a conspirator than a mother. It was the smaller moments that he remembered. When the old housekeeper had been sick or off, Donni would take him to the store. Glow-in-the-dark candy or ketchup dyed green. If he held it up and it had made her laugh, it went into the cart. She didn’t even look at the price. And for a moment, it felt like he’d won something.
He'd felt the same way when they watched old films together, or she’d sneak him little sips of wine. Hints of sweetness that made him feel taken care of. Loved. She had loved him once, he was sure of it, but even now he could feel the remnants of what they had crumbling in his hands like a fragile ice flake, so evanescent that it was as if it had never even existed in the first place.
He wondered if she would ever love him again.
???????
Donni drove around for a while in the hills where she had used to take Rafe when he was little. Sometimes after visiting his mother in the clinic, he would look so stoically depressed that she would take him out for “deer drives,” cruising through the protected parklands to look for wild animals, like deer and quail and rabbits. Once, parked in the picnic spot reserved for campers, they had even seen a solitary mountain lion.
As Riachuelo became more developed and its wine industry had boomed, new buildings gnawed away at the edges of the parks, chasing the animals inward. Now, as she drove, feeling rather depressed herself, she didn’t see anything. Everything was different.
Rafe had made it clear from the beginning that he would have her at any cost. He didn’t believe in playing fair; he simply took. And if he was twisted enough to sneak into her bed and send her depraved little notes, how far a stretch would it be for him to arrange this horrorshow for her?
