Caden,
If this letter finds you, then just know that I have loved you every second of your existence. I’ve thought of nothing but your well-being since you came into this world. Stay with your aunt. She will keep you safe. And when the time comes, please know that everything I did was for you. You are the Light we look toward. Don’t ever forget it. Be strong. I love you, my son.
Sean had read this note hundreds of times. He’d memorized the shape of the letters, the small ink splotch beside the wordsafe, even the mysteriously capitalizedL. His mother’s last words to him. A familiar chill, merciless in its intensity, settled deep in his chest, same as it always did when thoughts of his mother surfaced.
Seven years hadn’t warmed it in the slightest.
The ice of loneliness.
He had his aunt, yes. Loved her dearly. Still lived with her like a child, thanks to some strange paranoia she’d shared with his mother, one that made her want him close by, never to stray.
Stay with your aunt. She will keep you safe.
Safe from what?
He’d asked that question a million times and still had yet to receive an adequate answer.
Despite that, he loved Aunt Blaire. Sometimes, though, the reminder that he was an orphan would sucker punch him right in the soul.
His headache roared.
After replacing the note, Sean stared down at his bleeding finger, remembering the way his mother’s blood had caked in the crevices of his hands and stained beneath his nails. It had taken multiple washes to clean it away, and when the last swirl of red had spiraled down the shower drain, he’d suddenly panicked. That blood, the diluted streams of pink, were all that was left of his mother. Her body had been taken, and he never wanted to see it again—not with her damaged face and slit throat—yet he’d just washed the last bits of his mother down the drain like she didn’t matter.
He recalled the jolting pain in his kneecaps when he’d fallen to the porcelain, scrambling to plug the drain so the blood couldn’t escape.
But it was too late.
He was too late.
“Sean!” Aunt Blaire called up the stairs, jolting him from his thoughts. “You up? I made you birthday muffins!”
Ah. Yes. His birthday. He’d forgotten, since twenty-one looked about the same as twenty. Nothing had changed since yesterday. He was still there, living in his aunt’s house in Middle Of Nowhere, California. Still working the same job at a tiny fitness center in the closest town—with a population of less than a thousand people. Still bound by a promise he’d made his dead mother’s memory when he’d been too young to know better.
Sean assured Aunt Blaire he’d be right down, then winced at a particularly sharp twinge of his headache. He found the ibuprofen without shedding any more blood. A birthday miracle.
Downstairs, the scent of blueberries grew thick, making his stomach growl. Aunt Blaire accepted a kiss on the cheek as she blended her jasmine tea. The woman called herself a healer, but Sean and Cole—Blaire’s son—liked to tease that she was a witch, selling her tinctures and lotions to the local townsfolk as if they actually did anything.
She did have a knack for treating ailments though.
Sean settled at the kitchen table, three muffins in hand. “Where’s Cole?”
“I needed some green tea leaves.”
So he’d be gone awhile, then, given Aunt Blaire’s preferred tea shop was over an hour away. “Long drive,” Sean said. He had always hated how far they lived from everything, hidden in the trees without neighbors. Isolated, like they were hiding something. “I still don’t understand why you and Mom never considered moving closer to town.”
She laughed. “Why would we? We’re nature people. You know that.”
He thought of the note upstairs. The blood on his hands.
“Why do you ask?” Aunt Blaire asked, yanking him from his memories.
Sean shrugged without looking at her. “Just thinking about her. If we’d lived closer, maybe people would have heard her screams.”
He sensed her sudden stillness. The night his mother was killed, Aunt Blaire had been visiting a sick man from town. Cole had stayed after soccer practice to chill with a girl. Sean was the first to return home.
His mother had been alone when the intruders came. Vulnerable.
After a moment, Blaire circled the kitchen island and sank into the chair beside him, her long skirts settling around his feet as she took his hand.
