The Pretender - Cora Brent Page 0,45
and the men would bicker in low voices while my mother and aunts had passive aggressive conversations about handbags and marble floors. My oldest cousins were rarely around and I wished they’d take the twins from hell with them but Angus and Grey were present a lot more than I cared to see them. During a pool game Angus once held my head underwater until I started to black out. Another time he and Grey asked me if I wanted to see something cool and ushered me over to a backyard corner where they unearthed a mass grave of decaying seagulls they’d killed with pellet guns.
And then there was the time my mother’s cat – a soft, trusting calico named Betsy – disappeared. The following Christmas, while the adults were preoccupied with their liquor, Angus cornered me and bragged that he’d smothered the cat and dismembered her body.
Deep in my left pocket my fingers connect with a wrapper and I pull out a Milky Way bar that I’d stowed in there last week and forgotten about. It’s a nice surprise because I’m hungry and as I tear the wrapper off I can’t help but think of my dad. This was his favorite candy and he kept a glass jar filled with the miniature versions on the cherry wood desk in his office. He let me know I could sneak in there and take some anytime I wanted even if my mother was shouting that dinner would be served in five minutes. He always wanted to see what new tricks I’d learned in karate or hear about my baseball games and he paid attention to my report cards.
He was a good father.
He worked a lot and often missed little league games and school concerts but he loved me and he loved my mom. Professionally he was known for ruthlessness and I’ll probably never know if he was involved in that terrible situation with the activists. But I like to think that the guy who idolized my mother and slipped me candy bars and tucked the blankets around my shoulders long after I should have been asleep was a decent man at heart.
After washing the candy bar down with a mouthful of snow I decide to take a hike up the peak. It’s not the brightest idea I’ve ever had, considering the ground is slippery, I have no phone and no one except for the camera man at the lookout has any idea that I’m out here. But the peak is small and I scale it without a problem. From the top I can see Black Mountain in the distance. The valley in between looks like a Christmas postcard. The sun has broken through the haze of grey winter clouds and for now the temperature is less hostile even all the way up here.
My gaze is still pointed in the direction of Black Mountain. All I see of the town is the distant spire of the tallest church but I know that church is located within a mile of Black Mountain Academy.
Where I should be right now.
Where Camden is.
Every time I think of the betrayal in her voice and the way her pretty eyes were bright with tears yesterday I feel a little worse and I already felt pretty bad in that moment. She doesn’t know whether or not to believe anything I say and why should she? So far I haven’t given her much to work with. The truth is, Camden is the first girl I’ve really wanted to know in every way.
No, it’s more than that. I want her to know me too. When I ask her to trust me I want her to feel no hesitation in believing that she can.
And I’ve already started to think of her as mine.
In fact, I can’t think of her any other way.
Damn it.
That’s right. Damn it all to hell.
Because there’s more than Camden at stake here. I fucking hate the thought of living the rest of my life this way. Wrapped in terrible secrets like some mafia character, muttering ‘Don’t ask about my business’ threats to anyone who gets too close.
I hate it so much that I open my mouth and scream. I scream at the sky and at the tall evergreen sentinels below and at Black Mountain and at Devil Valley. I scream at my mother and I scream at myself. I scream at my broken past and my lonely future.
When my throat is raw and my voice exhausted I sit