“Pretty place you’ve got here,” he told Honey. “I can see why it appeals more than where Joe first found you.”

I wanted to raise my pups far from the stink and smell of that world.

“Yeah, well, it’s not all pretty. No argument there.”

Joe could feel Honey’s smile in his mind.

But it’s not all bad either, she admitted.

“I wasn’t going to bring that up,” Jack said. “But since you did, yeah. There are parts of that world that’ll just take your breath away. I figure it’s just like most of us. We’ve all got some good in us, we’ve got some bad.”

Not all of us. There are some that are all bad.

“Or the same as,” Jack agreed. He grinned at her, a feral coyote’s grin. “And the ones that are like that, well, we just put down to make more room for beauty to grow.”

He finished making the cigarette and handed it and his lighter to Joe.

“Do the honours,” he said.

Joe flicked the wheel of the Zippo and a small flame sprang up from its wick.

“Light in the dark,” Jack murmured.

Joe nodded and lit the cigarette.

“Light in the dark,” he agreed.

Jilly

I write down the story the way I made it happen for Mattie, how every time Del came swaggering into my room, I put all the evil and hurt he did to me onto her so that she had to carry the weight of it instead of me. He would always say that I made him do those terrible things, but in my head, she was the one who made him do it. Not me. But all I really did was transfer my pain to her just so that I could get through the days and nights I had to live in that house of my enemy.

I don’t sugarcoat the story now, or leave anything out, because it’s not going to work if I’m not totally honest.

It doesn’t matter that I didn’t know what I was doing at the time.

It doesn’t matter that I was just a messed-up kid myself.

All that matters is for me to find a way to make things right for Mattie.

So I sit there on the floor, working on it, filling the handful of blank pages at the end of the book with lines of tiny printing and little sketches.

After awhile I get up and take the book outside. I realize that this isn’t the kind of thing I can finish in here. Not in this house, in this room.

It’s where it all started, not where it should end.