Her father made her feel out of control. And she didn’t like it. She’d feel better if he agreed to fight her; at least then she could tell if she was winning. With an opponent who kept letting you hit him, who never got up after being knocked down the first time, there was no joy in the fight. She needed someone to hit back.

At least her mother had tried. Their arguments were spectacular, the verbal equivalent of the most gorgeously fucked-up Jackson Pollock canvas, with splatters of blame and accusations streaked across the surface like ugly scars. In the midst of them, caught up in the wonder and the glory, Caddie felt alive. Inspiration sparked from her, and her soul was poured out in vivid color. It was only later, when she stepped back and saw the finished product displayed like art on a museum wall, that she found she hadn’t quite captured what she’d wanted to after all.

Still, incomplete work was better than none at all. She’d succeeded in pushing her mother to the brink, hadn’t she? She’d managed to get herself sent away. And while she now dearly wished she’d never gone so far, there was some satisfaction in having accomplished it so neatly. She saw her success as a measure of her own powers, rather than the result of her mother’s failings, and from this she took strength.

But her father, he was something altogether different. She didn’t understand him. She’d thought she knew where to begin picking him apart, where the edges of the scab were, but she’d been wrong. She couldn’t get to him by simply hammering away at his heart, as she’d hoped. He didn’t seem to have one to break.

She needed to know more about him if she was going to get him to understand the depths of her loathing. She once again got out of bed, this time pulling on a sweatshirt against the coolness of the air and putting on a pair of socks. Then she headed down the hall to her father’s bedroom.

The door was open, depriving her of the joy of physically invading his private space. She walked in and stood there, looking around. Like her own room, his was sparsely furnished. The bed, she noted with some interest, was not centered, as she would have expected, but pushed against one wall, so that the right side was unusable. Apparently, he didn’t expect anyone other than himself to be sleeping there. That explains a lot, she thought.