in short, quick flashes, others in painful stings. Her mother had been with so many men, so many losers, bastards. Why then would she insist on putting Maggie’s father in that same category? What kind of cruel joke was she trying to play? Was this something Everett had planted? Something he had convinced her mother to do? Whatever the reason, it managed to bring the walls—those carefully constructed barriers—crashing down, and now the flood of memories wouldn’t stop.
Maggie sipped her Scotch, holding it in her mouth and then letting it slide down her throat as she closed her eyes and relished the slow burn. She waited for its heat to warm her and to erase that tension in the back of her neck. She waited for it to fill that hollow gap deep inside her, though she knew it would need to travel to her heart to accomplish that feat. Tonight for some reason the pleasant buzz had simply made her feel a bit light-headed, restless and…and admit it, damn it. Restless and alone. Alone with all those goddamn memories invading her mind and shattering her soul piece by piece.
How could her mother try to take away, to tarnish, the one thing from her childhood that Maggie still held so dear—her father’s love? How could she? Why would she even try? Yes, perhaps she was slow to love and trust, quick to suspect, but that had nothing to do with her father, and everything to do with a mother who had abandoned her for Jack Daniel’s. Maggie had done the only thing a child knew how to do. She had survived, making herself strong. If that meant keeping others at arm’s length, then so be it. It was necessary. It was one of the few things in her life she had control over. If people who cared about her didn’t get that, then maybe it was their problem and not hers.
She reached for the bottle of Scotch, then paused when its neck clinked against the lip of the glass, waiting to make sure her movement and the noise hadn’t disturbed Harvey. An ear twitched, but his head stayed solidly in her lap.
Maggie remembered her mother telling her after her father’s death that he would always be with her. That he would watch over her.
Bullshit! Why even say that?
And yet, she knew she should have found some comfort in the thought that her father was still with them somehow, perhaps watching. But even as a child she remembered wondering that, if her mother truly believed that, why then had she acted the way she had? Why had she brought strange men home with her night after night? That is, until she moved her recreation to hotel rooms. Maggie wasn’t sure what had been worse, listening through the paper-thin walls of their apartment to some stranger fucking her drunk mother or being twelve and spending the nights home all alone.
That which does not destroy us, makes us stronger.
So now she was this tough FBI agent who battled evil on a regular basis. Then why the hell was it still so difficult to deal with her childhood? Why were those memories of her mother’s drunken bouts and suicide attempts still able to demolish her and leave her feeling vulnerable? Leave her feeling like the only way she could examine those memories was through the bottom of a Scotch glass? Why did visions of that twelve-year-old little girl tossing handfuls of dirt onto her father’s shiny casket remind her of how hollow she felt inside?
She thought she had risen above her past long ago. Why did it keep seeping into her present? Why could her mother’s words, her lies, crumble away that solid barrier she had created?
Goddamn it!
Somewhere deep inside, Maggie knew something was broken. She hadn’t ever admitted it to anyone, but she knew. She could feel it. There was a hole, a wound that still bled, an emptiness that could still chill her, stop her in her tracks and send her reaching, searching for more bricks to build up the wall around it. If she could not heal the wound, perhaps she could at least seal it and keep it off-limits from anyone else, maybe even herself.
She knew about the syndromes, the psychology, the inevitable scars from growing up with an alcoholic parent. How a child could be left feeling there was no one to trust. Happiness was as elusive as the fleeting moment of the parent making promises one minute and