WAKE UP.

Then the vampires left Morganville. One day they were just … gone. Amelie left a note, saying that she was leaving the town to us and that she trusted us to run it properly. Eve inherited the coffee shop where she’d worked so many years. Michael became a rock star overnight and went on tour, and I never thought to wonder how he was managing that, given the blood drinking and all, much less the sunlight. I was busy, you see. Busy being the new mayor of Morganville. The rule of the Morrell family was over, and Richard owned a used-car lot and Monica worked at a nail salon, until one day she got run over by a bus. Very sad.

You’re making it up, Shane, in your head. You have to wake up now, or it’s too late.

And Claire, my sweet and beautiful Claire, she got pregnant six months after we were married. I only remember parts of that, little parts where I listened to the baby’s heartbeat and saw the sonograms and Claire in labor and crying with joy after all the screaming, and then the weight of my daughter in my arms and her eyes, water-blue eyes wide and staring up at me.

It had a threadbare beauty to it, like an old film, and it kept feeling less and less like my life and more like dreams, dreams that sagged around the edges at the corners of my eyes, dreams that melted and puddled and hid in the shadows.

Because it isn’t real.

Then it was like a jump cut in a movie, no transition. I was walking, and it was raining, just a light, cold mist that beaded up in fine drops on my leather jacket. I was shivering, and I didn’t know why I was out in the rain when the Glass House was right behind me, with its warm lights and Claire smiling from the window with our daughter in her arms. Where was I going? What was I doing? I felt a bubbling sense of panic, and then I turned the corner and stopped, because my father, Frank Collins, was standing there in front of me, and he said, “Hello, son. I’ve been trying to reach you.”

It wasn’t the Frank that had abused me and betrayed me and used me. It was the Frank I never knew, who never existed. A kind man with Frank’s face, and a TV dad’s smile, and eyes the relentless color of water on glass. “Dad,” I said. I didn’t feel all that surprised to see him, which was strange, because he was kind of dead. “How are you?”

“I’m fine, Shane. I heard you got married.”

“Yeah.”

“Are you happy?”

I was supposed to be happy. No, I was happy. I was. “Yes,” I said. Pain sheeted through me, just as it did all the time now, red hot and icy cold, stinging and gnawing and grinding.

Something’s eating you.

“I’m glad you’re happy,” he said. “You deserve to be. You’ve made me proud, Shane.”