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“Sometimes your gut knows things your eyes don't want to see, and your brain doesn't want to imagine.”

“I'm naive, aren't I?”

“No,” Vega said quickly as if anticipating the question. “You're not naive, Poppy.”

“Then what would you call me? Ignorant? Stupid? Benighted?”

Vega shook his head sternly. “No. I wouldn't call you any of those things.” His thumb stroked the hard nub of my wrist as he sucked in a quick breath. “Look, you can't blame yourself for anything. Even if you knew every last detail of what he did, you wouldn't have been able to stop it.”

“I could have done something. I could have saved my mother.”

“Your mother was already gone before he killed her. Pulling the trigger only took her body. It might have been a blessing for her, honestly.”

I yanked my hand out of his and twisted in my seat to glare at him. “How can you say that? She didn't deserve to die!”

“That's not what I mean.” Vega patted the air in an effort to calm me down. “What I'm trying to say is that she was suffering. He was torturing her. He stole everything from her. He even stole you. She had nothing.”

My heart hammered inside my chest at the thought. Vega was right. My mother couldn't ask me for help because I was a child under his spell. As she slowly went crazy, I pulled away from her. I stopped listening to her ramblings because my father told me she was sick. I stopped feeling anxious about her pain because my father told me it wasn't real. I stopped sympathizing with her because my father blamed her for what was happening.

He told me she refused his help. She wouldn't take her medication properly. She pushed him away. He made me believe that if she had just done what he told her to, none of it would have happened.

“I told her I hated her that day,” I said quietly.

“What day? What are you talking about?”

“The day she died. She was in the kitchen, walking around like a zombie and mumbling things to herself. I had gone to get a glass of water because I had a headache and my father had given me some medicine to take. When I went to take the medicine, she slapped it out of my hand and screamed in my face. It was just a scream; she didn't yell anything specific. It was just this guttural screech.” I sniffled as my eyes welled up with tears.

“I asked her why she did that, and she said, 'The devil makes him do it.' I asked her what she was talking about, and she went into this manic episode where she just kept saying it over and over again, 'The devil, the devil, the devil.' So, I told her she was crazy and that I hated her.” I wiped my eyes with the edge of my shirt and looked out the window. “I remember the look in her eyes when I said it. I broke her. Right at that moment, I broke her.”

“She knows you didn't actually hate her. Your mother, my father, they know their own children don't hate them regardless of the things we might have said.”

“What happened with you and your father?”

Vega shifted uncomfortably in his seat as he adjusted and readjusted his hands on the steering wheel. “All I'm saying is that kids say stupid things to their parents all the time. It's normal.”

What was he not telling me?

His chest began to rise and fall rapidly as his eyes grew shifty. He wouldn't look directly at me; his gaze danced around the car.Vega looked regretful, sorrowful. His skin flushed, and his eyes clouded, turning the dark iris into cataracts.

“We didn't see eye to eye on things like most parents with their children. He had a different vision.”

I twisted to face him. “What does that mean? I thought you followed in his footsteps?”

“I did, but I didn't want to do things exactly the way he did. He took unnecessary risks.”

“What about your mom? What did she want for you?”

“I don't know, honestly. She never said. But I sucked in school, barely passing my senior year. I hated sports—”

“I thought hunting was a sport?” I asked with a sarcastic tone.

“You know what I mean. A physical sport. I didn't play football or soccer or baseball. I had no interest in it.”

“Did she know what you and your father were doing?” Vega didn't answer, he just shrugged. “So, what happened between you two?”

Vega's face drooped, his eyes dulling to a matte finish. “She just stopped being my mother,” he said without emotion.

I arched a brow and pursed my lips. “What do you mean?”