29 MORGAN

Morgan. My darling, my ruin.

Clive had a deep voice. Gravelly. She remembered now. It was as though all his sentiments had expiration dates; his voice started so far down inside him that by the time the words exited his mouth, they’d already begun to fade. An incessant reminder that her time with him was temporary. He would never spend more than a couple of hours with her and her mom. Except the one time they had gone up to the cabin in Loomis.

It was no wonder it felt familiar from the photos. She’d been there before, once. She was almost too young to remember, her mind a palimpsest of fond childhood memories buried by darker ones.

Her past came back to her like old scars being torn open.

At her mother’s apartment, he read Morgan books and brushed her hair. If he stopped by after work, he brought Chinese food—noodles in brown sauce, chicken with a sweet, fried skin. He bought her presents and taught her to ride a bike. And when she fell and scraped her knees, he wiped the tears from her cheek and told her everything would be okay.

But it wasn’t. She didn’t know that the last time she saw him was the last time she would ever see him. If she had, she would have begged him not to go. Would have promised to be a good girl so he would stay or take her with him. She would have asked what she’d done to make him want to never come back. And then her mom left, too, and it was just her and Bern and the strangers who put the black bags over her head.

He’d called her My Ruin. That’s where it had come from. Morgan had never thought it anything more than a pet name. But now she knew he’d meant it as a jab, a verbal knife poke in the ribs. Call a spade a spade, right? A pet name when she hadn’t known any better; now, she canonized it among the classic nursery rhymes, a sinister tale masked with a lighthearted tune. Jack busted his head falling down a hill. Humpty Dumpty broke his shit. The ring around the rosie was a bubonic lesion, and pockets full of posies covered the stink of rotting flesh.

The picture of her with Clive and her mother surfaced in her memory. The negative transformed the photo into an x-ray, stripped them down to their barest essentials. They were made of the same stuff. The girl with the Bart Simpson doll, the woman with straight hair, the handsome man with a winning smile—underneath it all, they were three identical skeleton keys. Like the one that itched her wrist.

Had he been the one to leave it for her? Could Clive Reynolds—her father—be alive and searching for her?