But the suggested thoughts of Imogen don’t come out of her mouth. They remain solely within her eyes. Her face is a pale shade of blue as she holds her arms close to her chest in protection.
Meredith’s gaze switches between them before crashing to her knees in front of her son. A small, triangular piece of glass sits within his supple skin. “Don’t touch it! Come with me.”
She gently drags him to the adjoining bathroom, propping him on the closed toilet seat and fussing for the first aid kit under the faucet, her mind sprinting in every direction.
She looks back at Parker, who is expressionless.
Even now, with blood slicking his cheek, he is disturbingly void of emotion. Meredith isn’t even surprised.
When she sat him down on his bed some six months ago, telling him his father was dead—not wanting to sugarcoat it with a lie that he moved to Timbuktu, or that he was simply on an exceptionally long work trip—a smile had crossed Parker’s lips, as though she were delivering positive news. And maybe, in a way, she was. The devil in their home couldn’t hurt them any longer.
“It worked,” Parker had calmly said to her.
At first, she wondered if she misheard him.Your father is dead. He’s not coming back,she had said. How could he mistake that?
“What worked?” Meredith had asked her seven-year-old, confused.
“I hoped he wouldn’t think his coffee tasted too funny.” His smile grew. “It worked. He drank it.”
Before she could respond, his tiny arms wrapped around the back of her neck in a hug. And all she could do was hold him.
In this moment now, the same chill fills her.
“What happened?” she whispers, quiet enough so Alice and Imogen can’t hear her from the adjoining room.
Parker shrugs. Moments ago, he proclaimed that Imogen had hurt him. Now an oath of silence washes excuses away.
“Tell me,” Meredith demands under her breath, attempting to pry the little piece of glass from his cheek with tweezers. She internally forces her hand to steady—relax relax relax—removing the glass with one sturdy pluck. She studies the wound to ensure no glass remains, then presses a wet washcloth against his face, cleaning the oozing blood. From her kneeling stance in front of him, their eyes meet. She wills his near-black pupils to explain what they’ve seen.
“Parker,” she tries, her eyes welling with worry. They soften in defeat.
At first, he looks back, blinking. Then, flatly: “She didn’t want to play with me the way I wanted to play with her.”
Meredith feels his jaw clench under the cloth.
“And how was that?” Meredith swallows. She dabs his wound, using her other hand to fish for isopropyl alcohol in the medicine box. But suddenly, her attention is thrust back to Parker.
“The way Daddy played with you.”
Parker’s tiny hand snaps to her throat, squeezing hard against her windpipe in terrifying familiarity. His other hand begins to traveldown atop her breast, but Meredith shoves him off—bewildered. Her brunette bob shakes across her face as the memory of Michael’s final assault on her jumps off the walls of her mind. The disgusting things he said as he violated her on his desk. The way he brought her near death with his hands. He got off on her terror. And Parker must have watched it happen.
“Don’t youeverdo that again,” Meredith whispers, a stark harshness in her tone. She’s choking back tears. “It is not okay to do that toanyone. That isnothow we play, and that isnothow we show love.”
Parker stares into his mother’s wet eyes without saying another word, his expression even flatter than before—clearly upset with the demand. His stare intensifies. It’s fixed—almost lethal.
Meredith’s heart thumps a little harder. She can almost hear it in her ears, replacing the piercing silence around her.
Her fears surface for the first time, drying her lips in an instant as Parker continues to stare. Meredith stares back and finally realizes… she’s afraid of her son. So she better do exactly what he says.
38
IMOGEN
The sensation of Parker’s grasp viciously closes in on me. My throat instinctively cinches as though his hands are there now, and a cough erupts from my chest as I climb off the dining room table. I clutch at my neck, my stomach lurching so hard I nearly vomit from the shock of it all returning. I feel… invaded. Like something foreign and wrong was forced into the fabric of me and left to rot. The memory carries heavy shame, though I know I was only a child.
It makes my skin crawl to think his touch is part of my history—like my body kept it, even when my mind refused to. I almost want to scrub myself raw. To peel back the years and find the place where he laid that first stain and rip it out. But I can’t.
I force it back. Down, down, down. But it keeps scratching its way back up, frame by frame, unstoppable. It’s like watching something unfold in a horror film. Like I’m seeing it happen to someone else—a different little girl. And all I can do is cry for her.
