Not really.
In my head, he was always what he was now. Hard. Scarred. Controlled until he wasn’t. A man with violence in his hands and regret behind his eyes.
But Regan’s face softened as if she could still see him through the smoke.
“He looked at me like I was the only thing burning out there,” she whispered. “And I was too high to be smart and too lonely to be careful. We kissed. We made out under that desert sky. He was the first man to touch me like I was beautiful instead of convenient.”
Something twisted inside me.
Not jealousy.
Not exactly.
Something more complicated.
“He never forgot me,” Regan said. “But that night, he went straight from me to Mandy.”
My breath caught.
Regan’s smile was brittle. “She caught us. Saw enough to know there was something there. And then somehow, by morning, he was with her. Like I had been nothing. Like I had imagined the whole thing.”
“I didn’t know,” I whispered.
“No one did for a long time.”
“She did that?”
“Mandy did a lot of things.” Regan closed her eyes for a second. “And later, when I found out she also had her claws in my brother, I hated her for it. Hated her in a way that made me ugly inside.”
“Tarak?”
She nodded.
I sat with that.
My mother had not been one story.
That was the part I kept tripping over. Everyone had a different Mandy. A different wound. A different memory. To me, she was mother and ghost. To Regan, she was the girl who had taken Edge from her and twisted something bright into something humiliating. To Tarak, she had been something else entirely. To Edge, maybe love. Maybe regret. Maybe both.
“I never knew you felt that way about Edge,” I said. “That he went from you to my mother.”
“The same night,” Regan said.
The words landed hard.
I looked toward the ocean because her face hurt to look at.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
Regan squeezed my hand.
“No, honey. Those sins are not yours.”
My eyes burned.
“I know that now.”
“Do you?”
