The scar that ran down my chest burned as if a beacon lay inside my flesh. Perhaps that was Death’s way of letting me know he was close. Blood blanketed me from top to bottom. The metallic tang of it lingered in my mouth. I’d killed Ben Northcutt, and the dreadful shame I was supposed to experience over taking a life was nowhere to be found. That man had deserved his fate.

For reasons I couldn’t explain, I had the sense that Caroline was in front of me, touching the scar on my torso. I couldn’t see her, but I could feel her presence as surely as I could catch the scent of her perfume in her bedroom. We were caught in twilight, neither living nor dead.

I am full of hidden horrors.

I had never wanted to face that voice. It was better believing that a tiger had slashed me to pieces. That was a comfort compared to reality.

I am full of hidden horrors.

Dr. Haven had told me I needed to re-create smells and sounds and tactile sensations to bring my memory back. She was right. In that horrific basement, time unspooled. I was no longer an adult man, but a three-year-old boy, lying in a cold cellar. The ground was dark with blood. My blood.

I floated outside of my body, watching myself at Teddy’s age. Feeling Caroline’s presence beside me was the only reason I was strong enough to do it.

My mother was kneeling over me with a knife in her hand. She was reciting the same lines, over and over, as if casting a spell for an unbreakable curse. I am full of hidden horrors.

I’d known the story of Medea long before I’d ever heard of Euripides at boarding school.

I’d heard my mother’s voice taunting me all my life. I knew I must have been the worst kind of monster there was to make my mother want to murder me. All my life, I’d been haunted by that broken shard of a memory. As she stabbed me again and again and the blood drained from my body, I imagined I was being purified. If I died, it meant I deserved to die. I felt an odd sort of liberation in knowing that I’d been a sacrifice rather than a target. My mother hadn’t wanted to kill me because she thought I was a monster but because she knew my father was.

My mother had tried to destroy me, just as Medea killed her own sons. Medea had done it to spite her unfaithful husband; perhaps that was what my mother had in mind, as well. Only I hadn’t died.