Splinters of You (Retired Sinners MC #1) - Anne Malcom Page 0,110
screen, staring back at you, that’s the hard part.”
And it was true. I had depths of horrors, both variations of my own and made up. Sure, I was talented enough to decode a human being’s capacity for horror. To weave the words, and then to have the stomach to handle the words staring back at you. Speaking them into a machine that put them onto a computer didn’t stop the words from staring at me, but it softened the blow a little.
Or maybe I was harder now.
Six Months Later
“It’s my best work,” I said. “I know you don’t remember anything else, so you don’t have anything to compare it to.” I paused. Awkward. Uncomfortable.
My hand ached with the warmth. Of course it would. Most people with such traumatic bone injury that never healed quite right—because nothing ever did—had problems in the cold. They couldn’t stand the ice seeping into the bone. To the cracks.
To me, the cold was the only thing that helped. It hurt, for sure. But a different kind of pain. More comfortable. Familiar.
I could type now. Nothing like before, and if I went longer than four hours straight—which I often did—the pain was so bad, tears streamed down my face without my control.
Was that because of the pain or the story? I didn’t know.
It took longer, dictating it. I was stilted, unused to hearing it out loud. All of my dark thoughts. How easily I slipped into the mind of a serial killer.
That was what made the story so creative. I was so convincing.
My father frowned at the stack of papers I was handing him. It was big. The stack. The band holding it together was straining, and my wrist ached from holding it outstretched. I could’ve just had it bound. Much more convenient. User friendly. But this was how I’d done it with my first book, printed on our old family printer, faded in spots from where the ink had ran out.
I wasn’t sentimental. Or so I told myself.
After one more beat, my father took it, looking at the front cover. He frowned. “Splinters by Magnolia Grace.” He read the title aloud, then looked up to me. “You’re Magnolia Grace.”
I fought against the lump in my throat. He wasn’t structuring this as a question but he wasn’t quite sure either. He was trying to place me, much like you’d stare at someone at a party, wondering if you’d met them before.
“I am.” My voice shook.
In front of cold-blooded murders, the most notorious serial killer of the decade—they’d caught him, by the way—and members of the deadliest motorcycle gang around, I’d stayed stoic. But in front of the kind, quiet-mannered man who’d raised me, but didn’t recognize me, I was falling to pieces.
His grasp tightened around the stack of papers, face morphing into fury, frustration. “I know you?”
I swallowed again. Copper filled my mouth as my teeth sank into the flesh of my lip. “You used to.”
He stared.
I had taken great pains to look good today, as I did every other day. Because that’s what I could control. The ramrod straight bob I’d recently adopted was always smooth, always styled to just meet my chin. Black was still the only color in my closet. The one that was bulging, since Emily hadn’t had quite the attachment to material things as I did.
Now, I was adding more of my own touches to the place, while keeping her essence. She was my guardian angel, I’d come to think. Without her, I wouldn’t have the book my father was holding. I wouldn’t have the scars, physical and emotional.
I felt a kinship with her.
“To Dad.” My father read the dedication aloud. “For giving me the strength to look at my horrors. To turn them into art.”
He glanced up.
“That’s me,” he said quietly. “I’m Dad.”
I nodded, because I didn’t trust myself to speak. My eyes prickled, but I couldn’t allow tears to come out. I could cry when I wrote because that was okay. That was what the story demanded. I would sacrifice for my art, I’d done it many times. But not for my weak emotions. Not for nostalgia.
“Maggie?” My father’s voice was more recognizable now. He sounded almost like himself. Even if everything else was wrong. The outfit my mother had dressed him in. The room that I paid for. It had many of his home comforts. Books—though, none of mine—pictures, none of me, his chessboard, the rug from his office.