Prologue

One Year Ago

Ink

My father’s lying in the bed by the window, hooked up to so many different life-support machines they form a screen around him. My brother, Justin, is standing behind that screen, his eyes fixed on me as I approach my father’s hospital bed. Or should I call it his deathbed? It’s too soon to call it that, and as I realize it, I also realize it will always be too soon to imagine my father dead.

“You should be gone by now,” my brother says sharply, but his tone also carries a lot of regret and pointless wishing the situation was different.

I ignore his words and their undercurrent. This is what the situation is and there’s no changing it. He’s also right. I should be gone by now.

“He’s sleeping,” he adds and this time there’s only regret in his voice. Regret over me not getting the last goodbye I so clearly came here to find. “The doctor said not to wake him.”

I let the regret in his voice and the one in my chest slip on by and out of my thoughts. What I can see of my father’s face under his bushy beard is ashen, and even his beard seems to have more grey in it than it did before the shit that put him in this bed happened. He’s a big man, larger than life, always active, and he isn’t that anymore. I can’t shake the feeling that he’ll never be again. The hospital nightgown he’s wearing is covered in tiny blue dots against white. It looks like something a woman would wear. He’d hate it.

Is this really how my father’s life will end? In a hospital bed, hooked up to machines, dressed in something he’d hate? All the years I’ve known him, all we shared as father and son is flooding my mind, and I have no power to stop the memories. Even the beeping of the monitors he’s hooked up to isn’t breaking through the painful knot of regret, anger, frustration and fucking sadness that’s been growing and growing in my stomach since my father was stabbed three days ago. That knot is all there is now.

“He was a good father,” I say. Words like that come easy when other things to say are so useless.

“Is,” Justin hisses. He’s holding onto hope that my father will wake up and walk out of here soon. Besides him, only a select few have hope for that. The doctors aren’t among them.

“Is,” I correct myself because I hope for it too. More than anyone else, because my father dying is my fault. The simple fact that I couldn’t not love Julie put him in this hospital bed.

I wish I could say I’d do it differently if I got a second chance at it, that I’d leave her before it came to this, but I can’t. The most I can say is that I’d make sure me and her left a year ago, when we first started planning our escape from this town where men were willing to kill to keep us apart. We were stupid to wait and knowing that, feeling all that stupidity, makes my blood boil. I prefer not to think about it at all. It’s easier.

Justin is about to say something, but Dad opens his eyes just then. They’re alive, sparkling the way nothing else in his face does anymore. He looks so weak, so frail, so fucking defeated and it’s my fault. At least there’s fire in his eyes still. But for how long?

I walk over to the bed, bumping Justin aside to get closer, but I don’t feel the contact. I don’t feel anything. I’m in a dream, a nightmare, and I wish I could wake up. But I know I never will.

“I’m sorry, Dad,” I tell my father. “I wish I could go back and change it.”

It’s the truth, but I still feel like a naive ten-year-old saying it. Justin’s derisive snort drives that knowledge deeper.

Dad’s got an oxygen tube in his nose and his chapped lips are shaking as he tries to speak. I lean down instinctively to hear him, because I’m sure the words he’s trying to say, if they come, will be in a whisper.

His lips are shaking worse and worse, but no sound is coming out. And the beeping of the machine by the side of his bed is growing shriller.

“Live,” he finally manages to say, and it’s not even a whisper, it’s barely a breath. Or did he say, “Love”?

Then his eyes flutter shut and don’t open again. The monitor keeps beeping and beeping.

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