Chapter3

Caspian stared at me. His eyes were rimmed red.

“Daphne—whose child is she?”

“Aren’t you the one who knows best?” I said. “That year you tied me up in that factory. A lot of people came. She’s one of theirs.”

His face went white. From cheekbones to jaw, every bit of color drained away.

My voice stayed flat. “I thought about killing myself, but neither God nor Satan would take me.”

I pushed up my sleeve and showed the inside of my wrist. It was packed with knife scars—some old and faded, some new, still capped with blood.

Caspian’s phone rang.

“Your mom’s acting up again.”

He picked up. After a few seconds, his expression changed.

He grabbed my wrist and yanked me off the bed. He dragged me down the hall, into the elevator, downstairs, and shoved me into the car. The car drove for forty minutes before stopping in front of a white building. Iron gates. Barbed wire. A sign by the entrance read: Pinewood Sanitarium.

He took me to Ward B.

He shoved me into a recreation room.

The door locked from the outside.

The room was huge. In the corners, a few people in gray-white patient uniforms sat—some blankly staring, some talking to themselves.

When the first patient walked over, I thought he was just passing by.

He seized my hair and slammed my head into the wall.

The back of my skull hit plaster and my vision went black. He yanked my hair and slammed me again, screaming his dead wife’s name as he did it.

He let go. I slid to the floor. Something warm ran down through my hair.

The second patient was a fat woman. She came over and slapped me across the face. She didn’t stop. My head snapped side to side, my mouth filling with the taste of blood.

The third patient was a tall, skinny man. He crouched, tilted his head to look at me, then reached down to undo his pants.

Outside the recreation room, Caspian leaned against the hallway wall.

There was a gun in his pocket.

His hand stayed in his pocket, fingers stroking the cold barrel. If he wanted, he could rush in and put a bullet in the man pinning Daphne down. But he didn’t move. He waited.

She only needed to call once—“Caspian”—and he would charge in. Then he could tell himself: See? She needs me. No matter what I did to her, she still needs me.

I lay on the floor without moving. The back of my head bled. My left cheek swelled. My lip was split. A nosebleed ran down past my philtrum. I counted in my head. Twenty-three. Twenty-four. Twenty-five.

There was only one voice in my mind: Don’t go crazy. Mom needs me in the sanitarium. If I go crazy, no one will pay her fees, no one will visit her every month. So I couldn’t go crazy.

I clenched my teeth, swallowed the tears, and forced the scream back down.

The young man had already yanked my pants open.

Caspian suddenly kicked the door open, his hand coming out of his pocket.

The gunshot rang out.

Blood splattered across my patient gown. The man collapsed to the side, clutching his leg and screaming. Caspian stepped over him, strode to me, grabbed my arm, hauled me up off the floor, and slammed me against the wall.

“Why didn’t you call?”

His voice was shaking.

“I was right there. They hit you, slapped you, got on top of you—why didn’t you fight back? Why didn’t you scream?”

“I did,” I said, very softly. “Five years ago, in that factory, I screamed for you for two days and two nights. I screamed your name until my throat bled.”

I paused.

“You never showed up.”

Something on Caspian’s face cracked.

He let go of me. He leaned against the opposite wall, slowly slid down, and sat on the floor.

I didn’t look at him. I crouched, pulled my torn gown back into place, then stood. Barefoot, stepping through the blood on the floor, I walked out of the recreation room.

The next day was my father Marcus’s death anniversary.

I left at five in the morning, bruises still on my face. I bought a bouquet of daisies from a roadside flower shop. The cemetery was quiet. Pine trees whispered in the wind, and a thin mist lay over the distant hills.

I knelt in front of my father’s headstone.

Marcus Morrow was carved into the stone. I placed the daisies at the base and traced the letters with my fingertip.

“Dad,” I said. The wind stole part of my voice. “I came to see you.”

Then I heard footsteps.

I turned. A woman stepped out from the pine shadows.

She looked about fifty, in a white dress, gray hair loose on her shoulders. She was thin, with high cheekbones and hollow eyes.

She walked to Marcus Morrow’s headstone and stopped. She stared at the name for a long time. Then she bent down and set her own white flowers beside mine.

She straightened and turned to look at me.

Those deep, shadowed eyes were exactly like Caspian’s.

The woman dropped to her knees in front of the grave.

“Benefactor,” she sobbed. “Benefactor, I came to see you.”

I opened my mouth, but my voice caught in my throat.

Behind me, Caspian’s face went deathly pale.