33 MORGAN

Morgan shivered. She’d been cold since leaving Hudson’s house the day before. Invisible pins punctured her skin as though she were a voodoo doll. It didn’t matter how many scalding showers she took. The winter was inside her, freezing her from the inside out.

She sat in her parents’ basement, burritoed in a pilled blanket, surrounded by Eleanor’s albums and bathed in the ruby glow of her lava lamp. Loose prints were stacked in neat, symmetrical piles. Leather albums whose covers were worn by time lay closed, each one waiting to be read like a book.

Morgan selected a print from the top of the pile and pinched it between her fingers. A sudden tremor caused it to shake like a dead leaf on a branch. He looked like them. Clive. The man who had made her and left her. He’d swaddled her in wool and then abandoned her to the wolves. She studied this picture of him at a black-tie affair, holding a martini, Eleanor a vision beside him, and wondered, Had he been one of them? Well dressed and inconspicuous, he looked like everyone who’d ever paid her a visit at The Ruins—corporate moguls who loosened their ties and went to abuse someone on their way home from work. She imagined him with a black hood over his head, touched his neck where she would have seared the mark.

She didn’t realize she’d crumpled the photograph until she felt the cramp in her hand. Her nails dug into her palm. Morgan unfurled her fingers, revealing the ruined picture.

She tore it in half, then. And quarters. Ripped it again and again until it was a mosaic that could not be pieced back together. She sprinkled the shards on the floor. Her heart pounded. She could feel her pulse beating in her throat. Her blood warmed with the electric current that coursed through her veins.

Now, Morgan stared at the shreds of paper on the floor, piled up like the dirty slush that lined the curbs outside. Her gaze drifted across her desk, where stacks of more memories waited to be scanned. Hurt welled inside her.

Her hand hovered over one. She grabbed the top-most photograph. It was another one of Clive and a young Bennett at the pond, kneeling behind a row of fish spread out on the dock. In the background was a little shed, a stack of firewood leaning against it. Bennett smiled, missing his two front teeth as he held up an invisible line with a bluegill hooked in the mouth. Clive’s arm was around him. To their right, dragged up onto the bank, she recognized the canoe from the negatives. The one in which Clive had held her and whispered baseless nothings in her ear. A whimper escaped her mouth. She sounded like a wounded animal.