Chapters (51)
- Cover
- Dedication
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-One
- Twenty-Two
- Twenty-Three
- Twenty-Four
- Twenty-Five
- Twenty-Six
- Twenty-Seven
- Twenty-Eight
- Twenty-Nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-One
- Thirty-Two
- Thirty-Three
- Thirty-Four
- Thirty-Five
- Thirty-Six
- Thirty-Seven
- Thirty-Eight
- Thirty-Nine
- Forty
- Forty-One
- Forty-Two
- Forty-Three
- Acknowledgments
- P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*
- About the Author
- About the Book
- Also by Alison Gaylin
- About the Publisher
The bruise on my face has mostly faded. Elizabeth helped me cover up the rest with makeup. But if I touch my cheek, it still hurts. Gabriel LeRoy hasn’t just killed my family. He’s turned me into someone I no longer know. A weak person and a murderer. He’s turned me into him.
Elizabeth says that if I can get away from Gabriel, she’ll take me to the Gideon compound. It’s something to look forward to, I guess. But right now, all I want to do is make it out of this Arco station alive, so I can kill Gabriel. So I can become me again.
Love,
April
2:30 P.M.
Dear Aurora Grace,
Gabriel is a monster.
Love,
April
Thirty-Five
Summer
SUMMER SAT ACROSS from Reg Sharkey at his kitchen table, her digital recorder between them, listening so intently that she often forgot to blink, to breathe. “He was your son.” She said it for the second time, just to make sure she’d heard him correctly. “Gabriel LeRoy was your son.”
“Yes. His mother, Linda, and me. We went to high school together. We never quite lost touch.”
“Did you ever visit him?”
“Once, when he was a little boy. He had this funny way of talking. This lisp. He asked me for a doggy . . .”
“Did he know who you were?”
“No, of course not. I had a little girl at home at the time. My Katie. She was just a baby.”
Summer gritted her teeth. She’d just had the strongest urge to call Quentin. Put him on speakerphone and get him in on this. Then she’d remembered. “So, you thought Linda had called,” she said. “But when you showed up at your meeting place. The Arco station—”
“She wasn’t there, no. The two of them were. Gabriel and that girl. I didn’t see them at first. It was crowded at the station. We were at the pump when they . . . when they got out of their car.” The morning light streamed through the kitchen window, beams of it, infested with dust motes. There was so much dust in this house. So many old, neglected things. “It’s funny, you get into these situations when you’re young,” Reg said. “You know they’re wrong and they’re dangerous, but you think, ‘Just this once. Just for a little while.’ But then a little while becomes a long while and all of a sudden, you’re no longer young. It just feels normal, this dangerous thing you’ve been doing. It feels like it will go on forever.”