I hear her stand, hear her gather herself. The sounds of a woman reassembling her composure out of wreckage.
Keys. Purse. The soft pad of her shoes across my floor.
The screen door opens.
"Harlan."
I don't turn around.
"She's incredible," Marlena says. Quiet. "Presley. She's the best thing I've ever done. And I know you're furious at me, and you have every right to be. But she's incredible, and she's yours."
The screen door closes.
I stand in my living room with the marks of her nails on my back and the taste of her still in my mouth and the ruins of twenty-one years scattered across the floor.
I pour another bourbon, and I drink it alone.
CHAPTER FOUR
Marlena
I wake up in a motel room on the highway outside Sharp and don't know where I am for three full seconds.
Ceiling fan. Popcorn ceiling. The smell of industrial cleaner and old carpet.
The kind of room where the bedspread has a pattern designed to hide stains and the Bible in the nightstand drawer has someone's phone number written inside the front cover.
Then I move, and the soreness reminds me.
Between my thighs. Along my hips where his fingers dug in hard enough to bruise. My throat— I don't even need a mirror to know what that looks like.
I can feel the tenderness when I swallow. His mouth on my neck. His teeth. The marks he left on purpose because Harlan has never done anything by accident in his life.
I lie still and stare at the ceiling fan going around and around and try to figure out what kind of woman drives three hundred miles to confront the man she lied to for twenty years and ends up fucked against his living room wall before the conversation is even finished.
The answer is: the same kind of woman who fell for him at eighteen.
Apparently I haven't learned a goddamn thing.
My phone is on the nightstand. I pick it up.
No texts from Presley, but I didn't expect any.
She hasn't initiated a text in weeks.
The communication between us has been reduced to the bare minimum that a daughter can get away with without technically being no-contact: one-word answers, read receipts with no reply, the occasional photo of a horse that might be an olive branch or might just be a photo of a horse.
I can't tell anymore.
There's nothing from Harlan either.
No call, no text, no summons.
Just silence.
Which is almost worse, because silence from that man doesn't mean he's done.
It means he's thinking, and him thinking is the most dangerous version of Harlan there is.
