CHAPTER ONE
SUNNY
I should be dead.
Instead, I sit at the gate, waiting for my flight, picking at my nails that still have his blood in crescent moons underneath. My head throbs behind my eyes and my nose is still sensitive from the impact of his fist from the night prior.
Pulling my hood over my head to try and hide the bruises and scratches on my face, I chew the inside of my tender cheek.
There’s nothing yet everything in front of me. I’m free but shackled to an escape.A plan.
I stare through the airport window, watching the sun rise and glisten on the ocean's surface I spent my entire life in. I love my parents for creating such a safe space for me, a magical childhood.
I’ll miss this place. I’ll miss the five-minute walk to the beach, running around barefoot in a bikini all day, working in my parents’ garden, and painting in the forest of trees that surrounds the yellow home I grew up in. I’ll miss the feel of salty sun kissed skin after a day spent in the ocean.
The last call for my flight sounds, making my heart race as Ifeel the weight of it all, like an anchor trying to keep me in the only place I’ve ever known.
Something else, something foreign, is telling me to get on that plane. Tugging me in that direction so profoundly, I have no choice but to listen.
Picking up my backpack, I throw it over my shoulder and remain still, as the war in my heart fights with my mind.
Stay or go.
I hear the call ring out one last time from overhead.
My eyes linger on the sunrise I’m so familiar with. The one I watched with my family almost every morning in our backyard. Tears well up in my eyes at the idea that I may never be able to come back.
It will still be the same sun wherever I go next.
As I turn my back to the rising sun, I fall victim to that tug pulling me from all that I know, as I walk through the gate without looking back.
TYLER
The clock strikes midnight as I sit on my couch in front of the fire with a bourbon in hand. And just like that, I’m twenty-nine years old.
Memories take over me and suddenly I’m twenty years in the past, back to when I was a little boy sitting in a hospital bed, watching the clock strike for myninthbirthday.
I sat there, wondering why my father hadn’t been arrested—since he was the one that put me there. Even back then, I knew it was the worst it could get, as I sat in that hospital bed while my father pulled strings to wipe out the records.
It was only a short time before our last name was plastered onto the wall of the pediatric wing, in honor of agenerousdonation. One that covered up any evidence I was there, fighting for a life thathetried to take from me. I honestly would have let himdo it, if it weren’t for my sister and mother. Someone had to protect them and that task defaulted to me.
He yelled as he hit me, that “you cannot save anyone, not even yourself.” Maybe that’s why he is the way he is, because no one savedhim.
I always clung to the hope that he would somehow change. It was the naivety that comes with being a child that made me hopeful the man who sired me would turn for the better. That maybe we could finally be the family I always craved and cried for. Then maybe I wouldn’t have to worry about the bruises he’d put on my body. That one day it would finally stop. My birthday gifts would no longer be bruises, but actual presents I could unwrap. Something that wasmine.
That night was just a reminder that it never would stop, it still hasn’t to this day, but at least I knew the worst was over. Because even then, at nine years old, I knew death would be so much easier than that.
I wish I still felt that way,hopeful.
Growing up and seeing my parents flaws, I knew they would never change. It’s like losing your religion. After that night, I didn’t believe in god anymore. Not after he ignored all my unanswered tears and prayers. Not when I begged my mother to leave, but she simply ignored me, despite the fists I took in her place.
My father truly believed it was the only way to make me the man I needed to be. When ultimately, it was preparation for whoheneeded me to be.
You must be calloused, and how can you toughen up without some friction?
No, I don’t believe in god anymore. I no longer believe in my father, either. That hope I clung to dissipated along with my soul, my humanity. I buried who I was supposed to be deep in a grave and stopped grieving that version of myself the moment I laid the last of the soil down. It was in that hospital bed Idecided I’d be the man I needed to be, the man that he had told me to be.
Not prey, but apredator.
