I had been right. I was once someone who loved and was loved. It should’ve felt vindicating, relieving. But I felt my throat swell and with it a new realization: this information I had been craving for as long as I could remember, at this point, didn’t matter. Even if I cared about my daughter back then, or about Mickey now— even if, in that instant, I wanted her to live more than I wanted to complete my set—that was nothing after millennia of everything else I’d done as Peyote Trip. What I knew I would do, if I got my chance.

Even if I had been a good man back then, I wasn’t anymore.

LILY

“MICKEY!” LILY SCREAMED, HER voice following the bullet as it cut through her place in the shadows and the wide-open night like a tear to another side.

“Mom!” Sean shouted.

There was another sound in the dark, out in the water, a small splash.

“The float!” she yelled. “Go, both of you! Now!”

Sean shoved Ruth to the ground and dove into the water, Silas on his heels. Lily heard the churning of their wild strokes as she stepped out into the clearing, where Gavin buckled from the gunshot and fell to his knees, holding his gut.

—

WHEN SHE PULLED THAT trigger without pause, Lily knew—not thought, but knew—that somewhere along the way, one thing inside her had been misplaced. One wrong letter in the crossword, one vent turned the wrong way, ruining everything inside. With her mother’s cruelty and Sarah’s death and her own teen pregnancy, she became twisted against herself. But when she pulled that trigger, she straightened out.

She didn’t hate herself. Not for wanting to be a good daughter, or being a jealous teen. Or even for being lonely and falling, blindly, for a man she didn’t ever actually know. No, she thought as she stared down at him in the dirt.

She hated him.

She listened for the last few seconds as his ragged breathing slowed into nothing, and then she let the gun hang from her shoulder and leaned down to press two fingers against his neck.

That was when he grabbed her.

“You fucking bitch.”

Each word hit her face with a splatter of his blood as her elbow and the back of her skull slammed into rocks. He pulled himself up over her, everything slick and hot from the bullet wound in his stomach.

“The Lily Thompson.”

Rose had been right. For a minute, that gun made Lily forget that no matter what else she became in her life, chances were, she would also be somebody’s victim.

Gavin’s hands reminded her.