Page 38 of Deadly Obsession

THIRTY-TWO

SERA

YEARS AGO

I fucking hated crying in front of people. Ever since I was a child, I hated it. So much so that when I was in trouble, got hurt, or my kitten got run over by the neighbor’s vehicle, I bit my lip. I never allowed myself to cry, ?cause Daddy said not to.

“What the bloody hell are you crying about, Sera Doll?” he’d said from as early as I could remember.

I’d been so excited to ride my bicycle without the training wheels for the first time.

Daddy stood at the bottom of the hill we’d decided on together for my first big ride.

He had his massive VHS recorder on his shoulder like one of those green toy soldiers my big brother had when he was alive.

I never met him or anything, but I’d sneaked into his room a few times.

Brother had been on the 1988 Pan Am Flight that blew up over Scotland on its way to the United States of America.

He’d gone with our nan to audition for a Broadway show.

Daddy had never approved of John’s theatrical flair or nan’s and mum’s insistence he pursue a life in the arts.

He’d wanted John to follow in his footsteps and become a Royal Marine, a Sergeant, not a Modern Major General .

Brother was not the sort for rugby or football, though, it seemed.

When John died, and I was born a few years later, my mum might have named me Sera.

But in his mind, my dad must have named me Samuel.

Nan had been on that flight with him, and when mum lost them both in one bang, her heart couldn’t take it.

Or at least that’s what I believed, because she died giving birth to me.

My daddy, though, there wasn’t a day he didn’t treat me like a boy.

And by age fourteen, he was beating me like a man, telling me if it wasn’t for my birth, mum would still be alive.

But the day my breasts were too developed for him to ignore anymore was the same day he’d staggered into my bedroom drunk. Holding his quail gun in one hand and personal bottle of brandy in the other, he’d paused to glare at me.

It wasn’t his actual personal brand. He just liked feeling important.

“You sorry excuse for a son! Daddy’s Sera Doll,” he cursed, throwing the bottle at me.

Only to miss and smash the bottle against the wall.

The explosion of glass and its aftermath raining down on me had me shooting up in bed.

I’d not slept with a shirt on that night.

So when I sat up, bare to the world, I was horrified to see my father, bleary-eyed and stewed, wobbling in the doorway with his gun.

I’d never forget the scream. No, the cry that led up to that shot. The one that painted my fourteen-year-old face with her drunken daddy’s brains.

He was so horrified, so against admitting he’d lost his actual son and produced a daughter in his place that he’d taken his own life.

That was what I called toxic masculinity, ladies.

It wasn’t the men who wanted to open doors or chop firewood for you.

It was the men so obsessed with their own cocks that they’d convinced themselves that what mattered most was their last name.

But I still needed—still wanted —a daddy, and I’d lost the only one I had.

Worst of all, part of me felt like it was my fault.

My adoptive parents were great, of course. They treated me like their own and loved Alex from the moment he was born. But it would never erase the trauma I’d suffered or the feeling that I was never good enough for my birth father.

I’d only told that to one person in my life. My late husband, Micheal, during a night of intimacy and vulnerability. The first time he and I got into a serious fight, however, he’d called me his “ Sera Doll.”

It was an intentional slap to the face. Micheal knew that and exploited it. Eventually, it became his whip.