As far as Timothy knew, he hadn’t seen his dad since he was seven, ever since that day when the police came to the house. Ever since they started asking the questions. Ever since his mom was arrested and taken away.

He had no idea if his dad was alive or dead, now, all these years later.

An overactive imagination. That’s what you have, Timothy. An overactive imagination.

But how much of it was memory and how much of it was just a writer’s vivid imaginings?

But maybe it’s not overactive after all. Maybe your mind thinks about what you do in real life and then separates it from what you imagine just enough so you can’t tell what’s real and what’s not anymore.

“Julianne is real. She’s going to help me.”

Help you what? Help you kill? That’s what she offered to do, right?

“She said she would help me find out the truth.”

But only if she could watch you kill, photograph the bodies.

“You’ll see. It’s going to be different now, now that she’s helping me.”

Hemingway once said that writers should write what they know, and since then, books on writing and the instructors at writers’ conferences had been parroting back the same advice.

On the one hand, it made sense since you have to tap into your own experiences, at least somewhat, in order to tell a story, in order to make one up. How else could you do it? How else could you possibly make it work?

Writing what you know lends a certain authenticity to your writing, but on the other hand, you also have to branch out, enter the world you haven’t yet experienced for yourself, or your work will read tame and fenced in and small.

Your dad is gone. He’s dead and gone. You took care of him, alright. You taught good ol’ Dad a thing or two. You learned your lesson about how to fight back, learned that lesson really well. You’re an apt student, Timothy. As it turns out, you learned an awful lot from your father.

Then came the foster families, and by the time his mother was eventually released from prison, he was twenty years old and she had no desire to see him again.

And that was okay with him.

Because of the things he knew.

She was found in a bathtub with her wrists slit two weeks after she got out on parole, and he always wondered if she just hadn’t been able to figure out a way to kill herself in prison, or if maybe she found that being out of prison was too terrifying or overwhelming.

Or maybe his dad had tracked her down and made it look like a suicide.

Timothy put his writing aside and looked at the clock.

8:12.