Prologue
Beware the Monsters who Hide in Plain Sight
Growing up, everyone warned you about monsters. The ones that lurked in the shadows, ready to pounce on you, hurt you, steal from you, maybe even rip the life from you if you’re not careful.
They cautioned you to stay away from them, to protect yourself. They were the villains who moved in the shadow of night. The ugly, frightening, and grotesque creatures who didn’t belong in the pages of fairy tales but who’d woven their way in as a reminder and warning of what to evade.
But they failed to warn you about the monsters that hid out in the open. In plain sight. Gaining your trust only to make you understand why you were heedful in the first place.
Monsters who spent years convincing you there was goodness in humanity, that there was so much more to people than what met the eye.
You spent the greater part of your life loving them and believing their lies, stuck in the notion of something that didn’t actually exist.
Nobody warned you against those monsters.
It wasn’t contained in lessons passed down from parents to children. There was no trace of it in religious teachings. I wondered if it was intentional or whether these monsters were so well hidden that people didn’t even know they existed until it was too late.
I loved a monster.
He was packaged beautifully, a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
His chocolate eyes and easy dimpled smile fooled me.
He made me believe in love.
He made me believe in a lot of things.
But what a fool I was.
And as I looked at his lifeless body at my feet, I was reminded that love and happily ever after didn’t exist. It was all a well-concocted farce. A fucking fairy tale you told your kids to help them sleep well at night, a fairy tale you told yourself so you’d be able to believe in more than this—this illusion.
I looked at the bloody pestle lying by his side and the knife in my trembling hands, the stainless-steel silver blade now a deep crimson. I glanced at my dead husband, counting the stab wounds in his chest—one, two, three, fourthat I could see. His stark white shirt was a mixture of black and red. His eyes, shut then, had stared up at me a few minutes before, an expression of pure terror on his face. He had a slash on his handsome face. The skin sliced cleanly, blood still trickling onto the floor landed on my bare toes.
Fresh blood was splattered across my white Armani suit pants, which he brought back from his trip to New York last year. I couldn’t tell whether the blood was his or mine. The sick smell of iron which assaulted my senses should have repulsed me. Instead, I felt relieved.
The first bout of laughter bubbled up from the pit of my stomach, and I tried to stop it by bringing a bloody, shaky hand to my mouth. When I could not hold it in any longer, I let it out, loud and hard, my body trembled, and my shoulders shook.
I’d done good. I nodded at the masterpiece beneath me, manic excitement making me grin like the Joker.
A gentle hand touched my arm, and I didn’t need to turn around to know it was my daughter. She stepped around me, and I heard her screams as they echoed off the porcelain tiles of the kitchen. I flinched a little at the noise. I wished I could reach out and shush her, coo her to sleep the way I used to do when she was little with promises of a brighter tomorrow.
She looked from her father’s still form to me, and I simply smiled at her, then laughed some more. It was a loud and frightening sound, even for me.
I didn’t relent, not when she walked to grab my cellphone off the kitchen island, dialing the police, her hands quivering, her eyes darting from me to her father, then the door.
“Stop laughing,” she yelled as her eyes filled with tears. “What have you done, Mommy? What have you done?”
“It’s over now,” I told her. “It’s all finished.”
In those words, the weight of a thousand burdens I’d carried this last year dissipated. I felt redeemed.
I continued laughing hysterically until I heard the police bashing through the front door, guns drawn as they came around to where I was standing. One of them went over to Gracie and stood in front of her. Another asked me to drop my knife, and I looked down at it and smiled. The woman cautiously approached me and managed to pry the blade away from my clutched hand. These people had no reason to fear me, but they did.
“What happened here, ma’am?” the young officer with hard brown eyes asked me, her gun now lowered. She looked at me expectantly. She didn’t want to make assumptions just yet. She didn’t want to place any unnecessary blame on me. For all they knew, this was self-defense.
I was innocent until proven guilty.
I knew the drill.
