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Back Confess to Me Save as PDF
Chapters (87)
  1. Cover
  2. Also by Sharon Doering
  3. Title Page
  4. Dedication
  5. Prologue
  6. 1
  7. 2
  8. 3
  9. 4
  10. 5
  11. 6
  12. 7
  13. 8
  14. 9
  15. 10
  16. 11
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  83. 78
  84. 79
  85. Author’s Note
  86. Acknowledgements
  87. About the Author

Overhead lights are bright electric white. A faucet is leaking, and the drips plunk into a rust-stained basin. Each drip scratches at my brain. Air smells of iron and flesh.

The bathroom stall door is swinging, and the lock, hanging broken, clicks against the door. On the filthy linoleum floor, a body lies curled in a fetal position. A tangle of hair, blood-smeared skin and clothes, the faint rise and fall of a shoulder. A soft moan.

Rage lingers, clinging to my hot skin like beads of moisture after a shower.

My love. I did it for you.

“The people who say these cases aren’t real, they’re naïve. Oh, if they could be a fly on the wall in my office.”

Doctor Clifford Paulson, PhD Psychology
Transcripts from the Sixth Annual Conference on
Adult Manifestations of Childhood Trauma

THE RADISSON PLAZA HOTEL, CINCINNATI, OHIO

1

1

HEATHER

I came back from the dead once in Hunther, Wisconsin.

Don’t prime your mind for rotting zombies or cottony, lavender-scented serenity. I didn’t watch the scene play out as I hovered, ghostly, above my dead body. And, strangely, there was no pain. Not that I remember anyway.

Because I died once, and it didn’t seem to be all that big of a deal, most of my life I’ve felt comfortable with death, maybe a little too comfortable.

If death were a woman, I’d welcome her into my house, tell her she could keep her shoes on, and share cheap Moscato over ice in plastic cups on my back porch. The best of friends.

My memory was screwy, sporadically deviant, but I’d pieced together the details of my brief death from my older siblings’ accounts—like taping together pieces of a letter that had been written and then torn.

We were an unlucky bunch, me and my siblings. Cursed, you might say. Only two out of five of us were alive now. Reaching adulthood for the Hornne kids was worse than a coin toss, a statistic that had fortified my intimacy with death.

Anyway, I was six, and it was an accident.

Six. That’s how old Emily is now.

*  *  *

We were driving there now, to Hunther. The four of us in the old Toyota RAV packed with luggage, boxes, too many snacks, and a fishing pole peeking up from the way back as if it were our strange pet. Trevor was driving. Emily in the back, bouncing her feet and talking to Trevor. He handed a Starburst back behind his seat, and she took it, neither of them mentioning the transaction. Across from Emily, Sawyer slouched against the window, earbuds in, hoodie pulled up, face hidden.

Hunther was going to be our new, temporary home.

Trevor’s mom was dying. Her oncologist had said, three months. Such a strange thing, a prognosis. An expiration date stamped on your forehead, everyone talking about you as if you were a tub of cottage cheese.