“What did she want you to know?”
“First, she apologized for all the mistakes she’d made.” I leaned away, still holding his hand and caught Reid’s gaze. “See, like Laurel said, my mind is on some crazy-ass drugs. The only thing Nancy Pierce was ever sorry about was having three kids to take care of.”
“Is that what she wanted you to know?”
“Not really.” I lay back, pulling our linked hands over me. “Here’s the really crazy part: she said she’d lied.”
“About?”
“If it were real, the list would be long. In my dream, she said Missy was never kidnapped.”
My husband’s body tensed beside me. “What?”
I nodded. “Yes, I told you...crazy.”
“What happened to your sister if she wasn’t kidnapped?” His voice deepened as he lifted his head to see me better. “Oh God, she didn’t...your mother didn’t...hurt her, did she?”
“No. She said he offered her money so she agreed to sell her.”
“What the fuck? Your mother sold your sister?”
“In my dream,” I reminded him. “And here’s the kicker. It wasn’t, like, to a sicko as we’d feared. My mom said she sold Missy to her biological father.”
Reid’s eyes opened wide.
I laid my head back on the pillow. “I told you, it’s nuts. Even Nancy wasn’t that big of a bitch to sell her own daughter.” I let out a long sigh and rolled toward my husband. “Thank you for listening. I feel better just saying it. Now, I hear how absurd it is. I mean, if that were true, that would mean that Mace’s and my sister wasn’t taken into the Sparrow or McFadden sex rings. She grew up with her biological father.” I shrugged. “Hell, Mace and I don’t know the identity of the men who donated sperm to make us much less the one who contributed to her DNA.” After a yawn, I scoffed and kissed Reid’s cheek. “Good night. I’m going to try to sleep.”
As slumber began to overtake me, I heard Reid mutter, “Well, fuck.”
Reid
Three days before the end of Dusk
My surroundings disappeared.
The remote landscape, drenching rain, or lightning and thunder no longer registered as I stared at the inconceivable sight of my unconscious wife lying upon the back seat of Mason’s truck. I reached for the edge of the open door, my grip intensifying and stomach rolling as I took her in, really looked at her. Lorna Murray was the strongest and most beautiful woman I had ever encountered, and yet in this moment, as my circulation slowed and my skin cooled from the sight before me, I felt an overwhelming sense of failure. I’d failed to keep her safe. I’d failed to keep her from harm.
I found solace in her survival, yet where would she go from here? How could she move past this horrible injustice?
Lorna’s pulse was faint and slow. Her beautiful alabaster skin marred by evidence of the last few days—the trauma she’d endured and the misery she’d suffered.
With each passing second, every thought, even those of failure, was obscured by a darkness like I’d never known. It clouded my being and infiltrated my flesh. It seeped into my bloodstream and saturated my hardening heart.
This emotion wasn’t directed toward Lorna, never to her.
The dark that flooded my mind brought on thoughts I’d never before entertained.
While I’d known disappointment, grieved the loss of loved ones, and battled personal demons, I’d avoided one pure emotion for most of my life.
Until this moment, I’d never known hatred.
Pure, unadulterated loathing.
It slithered through my circulation like a snake, leaving behind drops of its venom in every cell. As I stood under the drenching rain, I felt its presence taking hold, setting roots, and growing ounce by ounce. All-consuming, the hatred fueled a potential for devastation without measure.
My boots splashed in the mud as I fought for literal footing. My muscles spasmed with the desire to hold and comfort Lorna, while at the same time harboring the need to lash out at a world that would allow this to occur.
I’d heard that love is light. Knowing the life Lorna and I had made, I agreed.
In contrast, hate was without light.
It was dark.
And while hate and loathing were new to me, I recognized them without question. This moment in time would mark the instant when, like the sky above, my light became obscured by dark. There would be before and after—everything affected by this point in time.
I recalled instances when I should have known this emotion, yet I hadn’t.
As a soldier in war, I’d walked with my platoon into scattered villages, knowing that danger lurked in the most innocent of places. A child’s backpack filled with explosives had the potential to take out an entire block. An old woman in a doorframe could be the enticement to death, or worse, captivity and torture. Yet I didn’t hate our enemy. I’d understood that the differences between us and them weren’t personal. It was war, two opposing sanctions with a long history that time had brought to a head.
As a black man growing up in Chicago, I’d learned at a young age that life wasn’t the same for everyone. It didn’t matter that some may see a level playing field. It didn’t exist.
I’d been born into what many would consider a good upper-middle-class neighborhood. My father was an attorney, given his chance by the US Army. He’d joined the service young and scored exceptionally high on their multitude of tests. Physically and intellectually blessed, the military saw his asset in academic endeavors.
He was encouraged to enter the JAG Corps—the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, a branch of the military concerned with military justice. While spending three years in a civilian law school—he was accepted at Loyola, University of Chicago—he met my mother. After graduation, his service was to the military.
When his obligation to the military was complete, they married. Two years later I was born. In hindsight, I realized my father was older than many other dads, yet I was too young then to notice.
Three years later, my father, as a retired lieutenant colonel, volunteered for deployment, taking on a new commission and deployment to the Gulf War buildup, code-named Operation Desert Shield. History would say the war was short—five months. If you asked my mother, it was a lifetime—my father’s.
He was one of the less than three hundred US servicemen and -women who didn’t return.
While I experienced growing up without a father, I never hated the military. On the contrary, joining the service was my testament to him.
Eventually, my mother, grandmother, and I moved from the neighborhood where I was born to a comfortable, albeit less affluent one. My mother refused to let our circumstances bring us down. Her hard work and dedication along with my grandmother’s oversight made me the man I am today. Our life wasn’t without challenge, but I was mostly unaware of it. Without a doubt, I never went without when it came to love and support.
I was keenly aware that no matter what I did, I lived with a set of rules not applicable to everyone. Judgment based on the color of my skin was outside my ability to control.
That knowledge made me conscious and weary of the consequences. Sometimes, I admit to being angered, yet through it all, I didn’t hate. As my grandmother taught me, hate was a senseless emotion to waste on people who didn’t deserve my energy. She and my mother taught me to focus on what I could accomplish, to see and be the light.