Page 20 of The Sister's Curse

I laughed. “How the tables have turned.”

“I bet you were a little bit like Leah, though. I can see teenage Koray being super responsible—babysitting, and staying up late to do her homework. You’ve probably been a straight arrow since you passed the terrible twos.” She rolled her eyes. “Though I can’t picture you sitting around in prim dresses.”

“No way.”

I sure as hell wasn’t going to tell her how much I was like my father. I hated that when I looked into the mirror I saw his gray eyes, the shape of his nose, the blond of his hair. It was like I couldn’t escape him. He had cursed me with his blood, and with all the crimes he’d committed. He was poison, destroying everything he touched. And I felt like poison by extension, aware that I had the same power he had to destroy. I had to keep it in check. I had to keep that contamination to myself, away from those I loved.

I couldn’t tell Monica. Sometimes I wanted to. Monica was the closest thing I had to a best friend, beyond Nick. But I couldn’t be honest with her about who I was. I tried to be a good cop, and to do what I thought friends did: swapping snacks, gossiping, and keeping confidences. But there were some things I just couldn’t say.

I knew Monica didn’t hold back with me. She talked freely about bad dates and how much her ex–mother-in-law annoyed her when she ran into her at the grocery store. She vented about her shitty experiences with her doctor not listening to her about her endometriosis, and about how much debt her ex-husband stuck her with. She could talk to me about her life, the entirety of it. History.

And I…I couldn’t. I wondered if she could sense that sometimes, my holding back. A couple of years ago I didn’t hold back.I honestly didn’t remember my father and what he’d done. I was free and genuine with her then.

Now I was different. My fury at him burned deep in my gut, and it poisoned all of my relationships. Maybe she chalked it up to my having had brushes with death last year. I didn’t know what she read into our long silences now.

I missed her. But I didn’t know how to say it without opening up some wound I couldn’t close.

6

One Slip

Monica’s phone rang, and I watched her face become wooden as she answered. “Yes. Yes. Yes, of course. We can be there. Absolutely.”

I lifted my eyebrows. “Who was that?”

“Jeff Sumner,” Monica said. “He wants an update.”

“Is he at the hospital?”

“No. He’s at work and wants us to come down.”

I made a face. This early in the investigation, I didn’t want to share any of my preliminary suspicions. Being summoned to give an update didn’t sit well with me, either. But would I have done any different than Sumner if I had a child in the hospital?

“You’d think he’d be with his wife and kid,” Monica muttered.

“Maybe he’s married to his work.”

Monica looked at me.

“I’m trying really hard to be charitable here,” I said. “I mean, he did say he was opposed to medical care last night. Sounds like a church thing to have a phobia of hospitals.”

“Maybe. Still shitty. Meet you at the plant.”

—

I drove down the winding two-lane road. Tree leaves flashed above me, and I continued south for a few miles, the river burbling beyond my right shoulder.

I agreed with Monica: those girls were not being well served by that church. But I had to tread carefully. There were a thousand perfectly legal ways to be a shitty parent, but there was something about the situation that didn’t sit right with me.

I thought back to the picture on the mantel, of the happy woman holding a baby. I truly thought most parents wanted the best for their children, however they defined it.

That kind of motherly love felt foreign to me. My own mother had viewed me only as an extension of my father. She never once asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I think she assumed I’d simply evaporate when I turned eighteen, that I’d disappear into the woods after my father.

And I came so close to that, to following the call of his Forest God, to relishing the feeling of death settling in the air around me. I had declared myself not to belong to the Forest God, had torn myself away from those obsessions and those voices in my head. I wouldn’t be a vessel for evil like my father.

I don’t think my mother cared about that, not really. Just as long as I was gone. She couldn’t wait to be free of me when she’d dumped me at the institution and fled.

I thought of Leah, glassy-eyed and silent until she dared to defy her father in that flash point of rage. She clearly blamed her father for her mother’s death. Her mother had gone along with it, and it had cost her her life.