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My dad was sitting at his desk, a glass thing with metal legs that stood before a wall of books and achievements. Indicators of a full life rendered suddenly empty with the loss of his partner.
The bitch didn’t even value him, and here he was mourning her.
He was folded over the desktop, his cheek pressed into the glass as he stared at a family photo, empties piled on the workspace beside him and littering the floor.
It hurt to see him like this. My dad was always a pretty normal, happy guy—this person who replaced him after we buried Mom was practically a stranger to me.
“You hungry?” I asked hopefully, nudging the plate until it rested against his arm. “I made your favorite, chicken carbonara.”
He sighs, his eyes still on that fucking photograph.
I want to throw it across the room, to beg him to come back to me.
Losing my mom was one thing, but if I lost my dad too—I didn’t know if I could take it.
“You know,” he slurred, his voice raspy with disuse. “I met Lydia in the games.”
I sighed. “I know.”
“She was a Ghost—our event was Hide and Seek. I found her a couple times, nearly killed her.”
I’d heard this story a hundred times before, but something in the way Dad’s talking makes me take notice. I climb into the chair across from his desk, bringing my knees up to my chest. “Why didn’t you?”
“Couldn’t catch her,” he admits. “Of course, now I think it’s horrifying. That’s the thing about the games, when you’re in the arena, you lose all sense of yourself. Some people never really come back from that.”
He turns the photo toward me, and my eyebrows raise. I’d been expecting the family portrait that’d sat on his desk the last couple of years, taken just before Mom got sick. But instead it’s an image, pulled directly from a newspaper, of my father, mother, and a man I didn’t recognize, a championship cup held high above my father’s head where he stands in the middle.
“It’s like they never work out how to get back to the person they were before they entered. Killing people, even when you have no choice, has a cost. It taints you, makes youwrong.”
“Dad, you aren’t—”
“Wolffwas like that. We were best friends when we entered, laughed about how we’d spend our money when we were done. But everything changed when I won instead of him. He never expected—” He laughs, dragging himself to sit with a hiccup. “He never saw me as much of a threat, but that’s what made me such a good competitor, Vic. They never saw me coming. Scrawny thing I was, Hiram didn’t think I had a chance of outranking him. But thenI did.”
“Why are you telling me all this now?” I asked softly. “What difference does it make?”
“Because you don’t deserve to have the only parent you have left lying to you.”
I shake my head. “Dad, Mom never gave a fuck—”
“Your mother was deeply in love with someone else and was forced into a political marriage of which you are the result of, and no matter how you feel about it, you won’t fucking disrespect her.”
It was like being slapped across the face, the way that his words stung. No wonder she’d always been distant. I’d spent my entire life blaming myself, working ten times harder than everyone else in my life just to please her, but the cards were stacked against me from the start.
“She was having an affair,” Dad said, the sadness and anger combining in his voice to shake. “I knew, I’ve always known, but I loved her, Victoria. I wanted her to be happy. Even if that was in secret. Even if that wasn’t withme.”
“Who?” I choke, trembling with the effort to stay in my seat. It wasn’t like I could choke the life out of a ghost anyway.
Dad’s eyes slipped to the photograph—it was all the response I needed.
“I’m going to eat dinner,” I said, standing on wooden legs. “Come join me downstairs when you’re ready.”
I don’t expect him to.
I expect him to stay right there, drinking himself stupid over a woman who never deserved him.
I’d watched my parents’ games countless times with my mom. I thought she was trying to teach me strategy, that she wanted me to learn how to survive. But that wasn’t it at all.
She was reminiscing about someone else.
