Grabbing the bottle of liquor, I turned off the kitchen light and headed upstairs. I didn’t need a glass. I’d be emptying the rest of the bottle tonight, enough to wipe out the memory of today. It was ironic that in the depths of my own personal darkness I did the one thing I had judged my parents for—turning to a destructive high. Maybe the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. In my bedroom a breeze wafted through the open window. A clatter two stories below provoked a dog to bark. A chill dove down my spine. I never fully felt alone here, as if eyes were always watching, skimming across my skin. Nothing was ever there, but their presence was always felt.

The rest of the forty-ounce and two episodes of This Is Us later, I could barely stand up when I heard the back door scrape open.

Cody. He’d come home after all. Maybe we could have drunk sex and wake up hung over together, forgetting all the stuff in between. A crack shortly followed as something fell and broke, and I headed down the dark stairwell, barely making out the edge of each step as I gripped the handrail on my descent.

“Cody?” I called out. My voice shook.

As I rounded the corner to the kitchen, an unfamiliar shadow passed across the room, reaching for me.

I screamed, my fingers fumbling for a weapon. Then suddenly everything went Clark Griswold Christmas lights bright.

Chapter 45

Chapter 45

Marin

APRIL

Murder, much like love, required the right person in the right place at the right moment. And also like love, it was a blurred line where passion ended and fury began. I had been lost in that fury for so long that it filled the hollow of my heart and poured into my veins. The problem was that I wasn’t the only one fueled on fury.

As the overhead fluorescent light doused the kitchen, I saw a very different version of myself standing before me.

“Mom?”

It couldn’t be. She was dead. OD’d the day we fought, when my last scathing words—“we’d all be better off if you died and went to hell, where you deserve to go”—sent her to her drugs, and the drugs sent her to the hospital where she died that night. The last thing I’d watched was Gilmore Girls, the mom-and-daughter duo we would never become. We had made plans to binge on junk food along with the season finale of American Idol, which I couldn’t stomach watching without her. It was supposed to be ours, our Gilmore Girl moment together, until she simply ceased.

And now Mom was back from the dead.

“Hello, Marin.”

The shock hadn’t settled yet, but I found a handful of words. “How are you alive?”