“Are you psychoanalyzing me, Shay?”
“Don’t fucking call me that,” I snapped. The name felt like a violation coming from his mouth now, intimate and wrong, like he’d stolen something precious and twisted it into something ugly.
He didn’t apologize. Didn’t acknowledge the request. Instead, he carried on as if I hadn’t even spoken. “You don’t have to do that. I can tell you everything you want to know. I promise I’ll be truthful.”
As if I was going to believe a single word that came out of his mouth.
I knew better now. Everything he’d ever told me was suspect, every moment we’d shared was tainted. How much of it had been real? Was any of it? Or was I just another experiment, another way for him to prove his own cleverness by keeping adetective in his bed, none the wiser to the killer sleeping right beside her?
The thought made something acidic rise in my throat, burning.
Still, it wouldn’t hurt to play along for a bit. Keep him talking. Keep him engaged. Maybe he’d let something slip, some detail I could use against him later.
“Is it some sort of trauma?” I decided to ask. “That made you the way you are?”
“Would it make it easier for you if that were the case?”
“Just answer the fucking question.”
Tom was quiet for a long moment, and I thought he might refuse. But then he sighed, and something in his expression became distant, unfocused, like he was looking at something far away.
“I honestly don’t know the answer.”
The non-answer made frustration burn hot in my gut. My jaw clenched. I wanted to scream at him, to demand that he be honest for once in his goddamn life. He must have seen it in my face—the rage simmering just beneath my skin, threatening to boil over—because he continued, his voice taking on a strange, detached quality.
“If you’re asking if I experienced trauma, then yes. When I was fifteen. My father killed my mother and my little sister right in front of me. He tried to kill me too—stabbed me and left me to die before he slit his own throat. Obviously, I didn’t bleed out. I managed to call the ambulance just in time.”
I stared at him, trying to process what he’d just said. He spoke about his past without emotion, as if recounting someone else’s story, as if he were completely untouched by it.
Was any of it real? Or was it just another manipulation,another lie in a long chain of them?
He’d never talked about his family in the time we’d been together. He’d mentioned once, offhandedly, that he’d had a younger sister who passed away, but that was a very long time ago. Nothing more than that.
I tried to search for the truth in his eyes, even though I knew it was futile.
His gaze remained steady, unflinching.
“So if you’re asking whether my upbringing has anything to do with the way I am now, I suppose it’s possible. However, I may never know for certain.”
Those same eyes had once looked at me with what I might have called love. Those same eyes had watched me sleep, had crinkled at the corners when he smiled at me, had darkened with desire.
I could never really read him, could I? All those moments I’d thought I understood what he was thinking, what he was feeling—I’d only seen what I wanted to see. I’d projected my own desires onto a blank screen and called it intimacy.
“Did that stuff with your father really happen?” My voice came out quieter than I intended, smaller. The question felt inadequate the moment it left my mouth.
“Would you believe me either way?”
No. The answer rose immediately, instinctive. I wouldn’t believe him. Couldn’t afford to. Everything was contaminated now, every story poisoned. Every vulnerability he’d ever shown me could have been carefully crafted manipulation, designed to make me trust him, to make me lower my guard.
Not that it mattered anyway. His history didn’t change a thing.
The world was full of people who’d been hurt, who’dsurvived unspeakable trauma and come out the other side damaged but fundamentally decent. His past—real or fabricated—was just an excuse. A way to deflect responsibility, to make himself look more sympathetic.
I wasn’t going to let myself fall for it.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said, with a note of finality in my voice. “Even if it’s true, it doesn’t excuse what you did. Plenty of people have shitty childhoods, but most of them don’t turn into serial killers.”
“No,” Tom agreed quietly. “They don’t.”
