Or it was all a dream and Dr Montgomery had some damn good drugs.
???
When I woke up, it wasn’t to my nightmare, but to a beautiful cornflower blue bed.
A four poster, with canopies of the same colour falling around me like something from a different century. The walls were blue too, but not plain—covered in delicate painted branches, blossoming things that reminded me of bonsai trees mid-bloom. The kind of detail that took time. The kind of room that had been loved into existence by someone who cared deeply about beauty.
As I followed the patterns upward I saw the large gold mirror hanging on one side of the room. Then I gasped.
The entire ceiling was gold.
My head hurt.
I tried to rub the pain away but it was relentless, a low insistent throbbing that sat behind my eye and refused to be reasoned with.
Had he moved me here?
Was it his wife’s room?
Gabriel had told me his mother died when he was thirteen. His father had never remarried. I remembered thinking at the time—back when I was soft and foolish and believed that love looked like loyalty—how tragic yet romantic that was. One great love. Irreplaceable.
I understood grief better now. It didn’t always look romantic from the inside.
If I was in his dead wife’s room that was admittedly a little creepy. I considered the alternatives and decided not to be ungrateful.
I pulled the covers down and sighed in relief. I still wore my sweater and trousers from—what day was it? Today or yesterday? The curtains were drawn tight against whatever light existed outside, which was no help at all.
I lay back down and pulled the covers around my shoulders.
Asher would protect his son. They may not be close, but that was his blood. His only blood. Whatever cold calculation lived behind those eyes, it would land on Gabriel’s side of the ledger before it landed on mine.
It was a mistake coming here.
I didn’t sit up or attempt to leave.
I closed my eyes and tried to forget the last two years.
Chapter 3
Asher
She looked nothing like the innocent young girl from her wedding.
The sparkle from her eyes was gone. She wouldn’t smile with the cut on her lip. She couldn’t even open her eye. Dr Montgomery’s report had said it all and then some.
This wasn’t a one off incident.
It had likely been going on far longer than anyone wanted to put a number to.
People say they can’t recognise evil in their own children. I call bullshit. Gabe could blame it on his mother dying. He could blame it on me not being emotionally available to him—whatever the fuck that meant. Therapy speak for a generation that wanted reasons instead of accountability.
I was there. I attended every football match in the rain, every parent’s evening where teachers told me things I already knew, every school play that thankfully didn’t survive past year nine. I showed up. Consistently. Boringly. The way fathers were supposed to.
Ungrateful little fuck.
I should punch myself in the nuts if that was the fastest swimmer I had.
It wasn’t Helena’s fault either. I’d known her since secondary school—she’d been the year below me, all quiet determination and dark eyes. She’d been a good woman. A good mother in the time she had. Whatever Gabe had become, he hadn’t learned it from her.
