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CHAPTER ONE

Mya

“Do you want to die, too?”

At first, I thought maybe the little voice I heard was just in my head. After all, the voice had said out loud what I was actually thinking— maybe death would be preferable to this…to this hell…to this pain.

The bitterness and grief I felt made the words that would have been my reply get stuck in my throat. I couldn’t say yes, but I also couldn’t say no. Most days I did feel like I wanted to die.

For the most part, I already had.

Turning toward the voice, I looked over at the little girl standing just shy of a foot away from me. Her little plaid dress matched the single ribbon that was placed on the top of her hair. She stared back up at me, her face somber and resigned as if she could see into my soul.

“I—no―I’m just sad.” Sad? Was that the best I could do? My husband was dead. I was more than sad.

I was broken.

She studied my face for a long while and then shrugged and turned away from me. “I’m sad, too. My dad is buried here. Is this where your dad is buried?”

Shaking my head, I stared at the headstone in front of me. Jason Stevens, 1996 – 2022.

I wasn’t going to tell a five-year-old my life story. I stuck to the main points. Sort of. “I actually don’t know where my dad is buried. I never knew my dad.”

She seemed uninterested in my reply. “That’s okay…he probably wasn’t a good dad, anyway. Mine sure wasn’t.”

Once again, I didn’t know what to say, but I was saved from continuing a depressing conversation with a child when someone, I assume her mother, quickly approached, took her by her hand, and whisked her away.

In the peace and quiet, my thoughts shifted back to my reality. A reality where my husband was dead, tragically taken from me way too soon. I bent down and placed the single rose I held in my hand across his grave.

“Hi, Jason. It’s me again.” I studied his tombstone, noticing that it was already starting to discolor. It had only been two years since he’d gone to work that morning and never came back home.

I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply. If I tried hard enough, I could almost smell him, the scent of his aftershave used to make me wrinkle my nose in distaste, but what I would give to smell him again.

After he died, I spent weeks in bed snuggled up to my pillow, refusing to change my sheets because they smelled like him, not wanting to erase what little I had left of him.

In the middle of the night, I would wake up sure that he was there with his arm wrapped around my waist but I would turn over to cuddle him and find only empty space.

That’s when the tears would start, a flood of them that wouldn’t end until I was shaking and exhausted from crying so hard that my body ached.

I stood up, dusted my knee off, and whispered, “I’ll see you soon, hon.”

My phone rang and I ignored it. I needed this moment alone with my husband. It was our two-year anniversary, or rather, it should have been.

The day was cloudy and overcast, nothing like the day I had found out that my husband was being brought to the hospital after sustaining multiple gunshot wounds.

Life was cruel. At first, I thought he would make it. I prayed that he would, but ultimately one organ after another gave up on him. Between the bullets and a post-op infection, there wasn’t much the doctors could do for him.

But I didn’t give up. I held his hand the whole time and prayed to a god I didn’t believe in to save him. I wasted my breath.

I remember hearing screaming when he flatlined. It wasn’t until later that I realized those screams were my own.

I closed my eyes, trying to push at the memories that always surfaced every time I thought of my last moments with him. If I sniffed the air, I knew I would smell antiseptic and feel the chill of the cold hospital room on my arms.

I could still hear the humming of the machines that kept Jason suspended between life and death. And then, as if my mind were replaying it on a giant screen, it happened all over again—his last breath, right in front of my eyes.

I still remember the feeling of hands pulling at my arms, trying to drag me out of the room as I sobbed. My knees gave out from under me and the world faded into black.

I woke up feeling as if there was a hole in my soul. When the nurse came to check on me, to tell me the news, I already knew. Jason was gone, taken from me way too soon.

I breathed in deeply as the memories washed over me. And it wasn’t until that moment, that I realized I was shaking.

“I’ll see you next year,” I said to him as I turned away on wobbly legs. He would have laughed at me if he knew I spoke to him every year on the anniversary of his death.

Jason didn’t believe in life after death even though he had grown up as a strict Catholic. It had been the religion of his foster parents though, not his own.

I had been shocked when I found the rosary in his belongings. Maybe he had believed in something bigger than himself after all. I couldn’t anymore. I was too angry, too sad, to believe in anything anymore.

The graveyard wasn’t empty today, I noted as I made my way away from where he was buried. The little girl was long gone as far as I could see, but another family was a few feet from me, standing at a gravesite saying their last goodbyes to someone they had loved.

I wasn’t good at goodbyes. After Jason’s death, I went to a therapist once who told me that acceptance was a stage of grief I would eventually get to. I didn’t believe her.

It had already been two years and Jason’s death felt as fresh as it did when I first buried him. There was nothing to accept. He hadn’t died of old age.

He hadn’t been sick, like my mom. No, he’d been cut down in the prime of his life. Our lives. And it wasn’t fair.

My small sedan sat just across the street. I opened the door and slid behind the wheel. That’s when my phone rang.

Thoughtlessly, I answered.

“Hello?”

“Mya, I’ve been calling you. Are you all right?”

I recognized the voice instantly. It was my husband’s former partner, Luis. They’d been best friends on the force and had practically grown up together.

It had been a long time since I’d heard his voice. Before Jason’s death, he was always at the house and he had tried to be there for me after his death, but I’d withdrawn.

I barely went outside or spoke to anyone anymore. It was as if once Jason died, part of me died with him.

Not that I’d had much of a life before Jason. Up until my senior year in high school, it had just been me and my mom. And then there was just me.

Mom got sick during my junior year. When I found Mom sitting at the kitchen table crying one day after school, all I remembered was dropping my bookbag to the floor, wrapping my arms around her, and waiting anxiously for her to tell me what was wrong.

She was the strong one. She never cried. She never complained.

She always told me that if I wanted something in life, I needed to make it happen. Excuses were for the useless, she would say.

In my mind, she was a walking superhero, a single mom who loved me with a ferocity I couldn’t describe. Everything she did, she did for me.

She worked at a gas station for most of her life getting paid barely above minimum wage, but she made it work. I’d never been hungry. I never felt less than. She made sure of that.

Mom was a fighter who always tried her best.

Pancreatic cancer. Stage four. There was nothing they could do for her. She was gone within three months. My life had spun out of control.

I began taking risks I never would have before her death, hanging out with people who brought out the worst in me. I had even been too much for Jason, who I’d dated all through high school up until that point.

We understood each other. We were both from broken homes.

Jason had lost his parents to a drunk driver, a teen, when he was just a kid. Sadly, Jason and I both became acquainted with the foster system and the neglect it held, though he had to endure it much longer than me.

I started running with some unsavory characters who I met at the group home I found myself in after Mom’s death. A few months later, Jason broke up with me when he found out that I had started stealing just for the thrill of it.

Eventually, he ended up being a cop. He told me it was because he had wanted to help people like me and like him. He even had to bail me out once.

I had been arrested on various charges, shoplifting, drunk and disorderly behavior. I had woken up face down in a jail cell.

Apparently, in a drunken stupor, I had chosen to call him from the station. He was my ex, but he had still shown up. And while I slept it off, he had gotten to know some of the after-hours officers.

The next thing I knew, he was joining the force, and I was just trying to keep my nose clean. I hadn’t expected him to want anything to do with me after that, but he’d been there for me.

He hadn’t abandoned me. In fact, we got back together. And then one day, he asked me to marry him. I had felt honored that after the person I became when I lost my mom, he could still see the person that I was before my grief.

Saying yes to him had been easy.

His faith in me had helped me figure out my life. I went back to school, started working as a social worker, and we had been happy.

Then I had gotten a call from Luis that changed everything. Maybe that’s why I found myself tensing up when I heard Luis’ voice today.

He was, unfortunately, always the bearer of bad news. Today was no different.

“I’m fine, Luis. Thanks for calling.” I took a deep breath and decided to be honest. “It’s been a hard day. How about you? Everything okay?”

He was silent for a long time which made me look at the phone. “Luis, you still there?”

“I’m here…I’m here.” He sighed then, and I could tell this wasn’t just an attempt to check in on me. Something was wrong.

“What’s going on, Luis? What’s wrong?”

I knew he had recently gotten married. I couldn’t remember the wife’s name. What was it, Sadie? Sydney? I was a hermit, so we’d only met once or twice, and I barely spoke to her. Didn’t they just have a baby?

“Are your wife and kid okay?” I asked when he didn’t answer me.

“Susan and Ezrah are fine,” he said finally. “But I guess you haven’t heard―”

“Heard what?”

“He’s getting out, Mya. I’m sorry.”

“Who?” I breathed, but he didn’t have to say another word. My brain finally caught up. My hands tightened around the phone and I closed my eyes, pushing back at the bile that rose in my throat.

“Nico di Cecco.”

Just hearing his name made me feel lightheaded. That couldn’t be right. That couldn’t be true. There was no way. There was no way they would let that monster out. He had murdered Jason in cold blood.

“Mya? Mya? You there? Hello? Mya?”

Hoarsely, I replied, “I’m here.” I stared out of the window, not really seeing anything in front of me. “How?” I asked softly.

He began to explain. I heard the words, but they didn’t make sense to me—something about a technicality. A technicality? He’d shot Jason twice in the chest and once in the head…he’d killed my husband.

Whatever else Luis was saying, I didn’t hear it. It didn’t matter anymore.

My hands gripped the steering wheel as the rage consumed me. It barely registered when he finally hung up, saying how sorry he was. He sounded so angry, yet he was just as powerless as me to do anything about this mess.

Powerless. It was a feeling I knew all too well. I felt it when the kids in kindergarten would pick at me for not having a dad.

I felt it when I insisted that my mom get a second opinion about her cancer diagnosis and all that second opinion had done was confirm that she had even less time than we’d expected.

I felt it again as I watched her die in hospice. And then again, when the social worker had come for me and dropped me off in a neighborhood I didn’t recognize, left to live in a house with a woman who resented me, along with at least six other desperate kids.

I soon realized I was actually one of those desperate kids, willing to do anything to feel seen, or in my case, to dull the pain.

I was tired of the pain, but more than anything else, I was tired of feeling powerless.

A stray tear fell from my eye and I wiped it away.

Do something about it. Excuses are for the useless.

My brain was screaming at me, my mother’s words echoing over and over in my thoughts.

But what?

My spiraling worries were interrupted by shots being fired into the air. I realized that a soldier was being buried a few yards away.

The gunfire from the gun salute echoed in my mind. Nico di Cecco hadn’t hesitated when he’d shot Jason three times. And the justice system would have there be no repercussions for him murdering Jason.

Nico was free. Jason was dead.

My eyes narrowed on the soldiers’ guns as they lowered them next to their sides.

Justice.

Without thinking, I picked up my phone and looked through my contacts until I found the number I was looking for.

“Mya, it’s been a long time.” His voice was high-pitched and a little squeaky. He always sounded that way. At the group home, we’d call him Squirrel…Squirrely Ricky.

“Hey, Ricky.” I paused, and then before I could lose my nerve, “I need a favor.”

“You got it.” He didn’t hesitate. He didn’t even ask how I was. That was Ricky for you.

We used to steal snacks at the local convenience stores and then sneak into the movies and stay there until curfew. It was our break from reality.

The two of us had been the newest kids at the group home, so we had stuck together. He had been in and out of juvie most of his life, so he knew the ins and outs of that lifestyle. He taught me how to survive.

We hadn’t seen each other since Jason’s funeral. I didn’t remember much from that day, but I remembered his hand on my shoulder, telling me to call him if I ever needed anything.

I didn’t have any friends, so I appreciated the gesture. Even though we didn’t run with the same crowd anymore, I heard rumors, rumors that Ricky liked to skirt the law, and if you needed something done quietly, he was your man.

Plus, he felt he owed me one. His mother had been a junkie, and when she had overdosed during her visitation hours with him, it had been me who had found her in the bathroom of the group home, unconscious on the floor, the pills not too far from her body.

I’d called 911 and had gone to the hospital with Ricky. His mom had pulled through that day, and her dealer had died, strangely enough, from a hit-and-run later that night.

“Can you get me a gun?”

There was a long pause, and then he laughed softly without humor. He said, “Going hunting?”

“Something like that.”

“Meet me by the playground across the tracks in an hour.” It was our old hangout spot. It was a desolate playground that sat rusted and abandoned near a condemned building that had once upon a time been a school.

The playground was about a mile from where the group home had been.

“I’ll be there.”

Without another word, I drove off. I didn’t look back at the graveyard. That was behind me. What I had to do was in front of me now.

Excuses are for the useless.

There would be no more excuses now. Not for me, not for those who killed my love, and not for taking my vengeance.