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Chapter Forty-Six

A s her mother’s empty casket was slowly lowered into the ground Krystal reached for her heavy gold locket. Inside was the last picture she had of her mother; sadly, it was over five years old. The bleak sky and threatening storm were a fitting backdrop for the mood of the mourning crowd.

She scanned the faces around her and noted the crowd had dwindled since her father’s funeral just twenty minutes before. With a sudden clarity she knew why there’d been so many young women at his funeral, all who cried genuine tears of loss.

Krystal put the pieces together.

I was just a pawn in my father’s sadistic game of dominance.

He never loved me.

He just used me to make mother’s life hell.

The casket reached the bottom and as the smooth white straps slithered out of the ground, she remembered the emptiness in her mother’s sad eyes when she left her at the airport.

As she wept openly it was impossible to miss Thomas’s great hulking figure at the back of the crowd. Her father’s partner was like a vulture waiting to pick up the pieces.

That night, Krystal, exhausted and completely drained of tears, reluctantly joined her grandmother for dinner. She stared down the long dining table and its highly polished wood surface reflected the image of her grandmother who sat rigid at the opposite end. The old woman’s pale skin was a dramatic contrast to the dark wood. Krystal despised her constant, vacant staring. The air between them bristled as if charged with static.

Ever since her father had disappeared, Grandmother Mulholland had shrivelled further into the shadow that began consuming her years ago. Her alcoholism worsened to the point where she no longer tried to hide her drinking habit and she rarely ate anything. Some days she refused to even get out of bed. Her skeletal frame and dark, bulging eyes gave her the appearance of a sick praying mantis. Krystal shuddered at the thought and looked away.

It was nearly Christmas and she pined for her old life. She remembered fighting with her mother this time last year and longed to put her arms around her and apologise for everything she’d done. She’d made her mother’s life hell, fighting about everything and constantly manipulating her father to side with her.

Her life would never be the same again. Two weeks ago, she’d been officially declared an orphan and the stick figure at the end of the table reluctantly offered adoption. She appreciated the offer as her other alternative was to be declared a ward of the state and as a sixteen-year-old, there was little chance she’d ever be adopted into another family. She’d have been destined to live in a state-run orphanage until her eighteenth birthday.

Staring at her grandmother’s emaciated frame, though, Krystal wondered if she was destined to be a ward of the state very soon anyway.