A tear slides down my cheek, and I wipe it away. The last thing I expected was to cry at Mom’s grave today.
“I miss you, Mom.”
Dad didn’t want to spend the money on etching her picture onto the stone, so I covered the cost. I run my fingers over her smiling face, and I fight back more tears. She was the one bright spot in our hell of a home with Father.
She came from the life like the rest of us, and she loved Father for reasons I’ll never understand. But just like Phoebe, she chose to be happy and push the bad to the back of her mind. She focused on only the good.
“I’m always thinking about you, Mom. There’s never a day I don’t. I’m just not in as much of a hurry to see you again as I used to be.”
Another breeze brushes by, and I sigh. Mom understands. And the kisses in the wind tell me she’s here. She loves me. And she approves.
Part of me breaks as I walk up to Joanna’s headstone. Like Mom’s, her smiling face shines back at me, and I sit down and just stare.
I wasn’t around when this picture was taken. It was before I came into her life. I always blamed myself for her dying so young.
“You never smiled like this with me,” I say. “You look so free here.”
The printed picture on her funeral programs is the same, and she shined. There was a brightness about her, and as I think back, I never saw this. There was always a heaviness with us.
“It’s because you knew your father knew while I thought we were a secret, isn’t it?” I ask.
There was passion and intensity, but I didn’t laugh with her. I didn’t smile. The threat of getting caught made everything seem so much more extraordinary. And running away together felt romantic. But it’s just drama.
And real relationships don’t survive on drama.
“How could you play that game? I never would have done that to you, Jo. My father could have ordered me to seduce you and make you vulnerable to get to your father, and I would’ve told him to fuck off.”
That’s how I fell in love. I thought it was both of us, but it was just me.
John learned my routines. Where I drank coffee. Where I ate. The places I went to collect money owed.
Joanna was suddenly always there, out of the blue. I thought it was fate. Our destiny. But it was just strategy.
He knew how to weaken me. How to get into my head, and how to get into my bed. He used his daughter as a pawn and essentially whored her out to get to me.
“I just don’t understand. What changed? How did it suddenly change from a murder mission to a rescue operation?”
I’m flooded with memories, and I smile softly as I realize when it happened. We were out together, enjoying our time together, and I slipped away to deal with some business. When I returned, Joanna was gone.
Walking around, I looked for her, only to find her being dragged into an alley by an associate of my family. I ran to them and freed her. Billy was his name, and touching her was the last thing he ever did.
Joanna stood there in awe as I killed someone for touching her. Someone who was part of the organization. When we fell into bed together, it was different. We’d been fucking, but that night, it turned into love.
And I suddenly understand.
“If you could play me for your father, you had to believe I could be doing the same for mine. But when I killed an associate, you knew I wasn’t playing any games. That’s when it stopped.”
It wasn’t about love. Not right away. But there was love. As I sit here and stare at her beautiful face, I know it’s true. Nothing I learned today changes that.
“I met someone, Jo. Her name is Phoebe, and she’s the opposite of me in almost every fucking way. And you, too,” I say with a chuckle. “I think that’s what I like best about her. She’s my fucking sunlight.”
There was a plan with Jo. We were going to run away and get married. Solidify the relationship to stop our fathers from trying to tear us apart. But it was fueled by fear and excitement. It’s why it was never destined to work out.
“I’m going to marry her,” I say. “With her, I don’t have anything to prove. I don’t have to hide or run. She knows everything about me, and she accepts me.”
A strange sense of calm fills me, and I know it. Father’s dead. He can’t hurt anyone I love anymore.
There’s a small twinge of something at the thought. Not grief. No, pity, maybe. Or maybe the final nail in the coffin that my past life is officially over. Dead and gone.
