Kind of freaks me out a little.

The money Vic gave her will only last so long, and then she’ll be after me for more, extorting me in exchange for my keeping Heather with me. I know that woman, and she is nothing if not a selfish, manipulative bitch.

“Why would you want to go back there?” I ask, hoping like hell she doesn’t say something terrible like I miss daddy. I always monitored their interactions as best as I could, but the Thing was nothing if not manipulative. I’m not sure that Heather was ever aware that she was in danger around him.

Aaron and I exchange a look when Heather doesn’t answer, the silence stretching thick and uncomfortable between the three of us.

“We can get your things, and move them into my house,” Aaron suggests, tattooed hands squeezing the wheel so hard that his knuckles pale. “Would that help make it feel like home? We can even get you a bed and you can share a room with Kara and Ashley.”

I look back to see Heather staring at her lap. She’s picking at the glittery skulls on her leggings, her brunette hair hanging forward and hiding her face. My heart clenches at the sight because I can tell she’s horribly, desperately sad about something.

“Our house,” she starts, and then sighs. “With Mom and Dad, that was the last place I saw Penelope alive.” My vision flickers with white splotches, and my heart plummets into my stomach like a comet, leaving a crater that I’m not sure I know how to fill. “Plus, her room is there, and all of her things …”

“Which we’ll pack when we go back for our own stuff,” I say, breathless and trying my very best not to cry. I stare out the windshield as Aaron holds out a hand for me to take. I squeeze his fingers in my own and thank the fucking universe that he came back to me, that he’s mine again, that I never truly lost him at all. “We’re not staying with Mom or Neil anymore. Are you okay with that?”

Heather doesn’t respond for a minute, and when I glance back to look at her, I see teardrops falling onto her leggings. I wish I could let her read Pen’s journal. When I open it, and I see the loops and twists of her pretty handwriting, I can hear her voice in my head. But how can I let Heather read it when it’s so awful? How can I let her crack those pages and find out that when Penelope was fourteen, she dressed up in a cute outfit and went out with her friends. She had a single beer. Not unusual for a student at Prescott High, to start drinking early.

How do I let Heather read about what happened when she came home, how the Thing amped up his assaults from molestation to rape. How Penelope tried to seek help. How they blamed her skirt and that beer on Neil’s twisted, fucked-up depravities.

“Penelope is always with us, Heather,” I say instead, my hands shaking. Like I said before, I’m pretty sure I have PTSD or something. But it’s not like I can go to a shrink and tell them all my problems. Hey, yeah, so, I’ve always had panic attacks when talking about my dead sister, but they’ve increased in intensity after I buried her rapist alive in a bloodred satin-lined coffin. “If you think about her, and you remember her, and you love her even though she’s gone, it doesn’t matter where we live or if we even have any of her possessions. She stays alive through our memories.”

Heather doesn’t say anything as we pull into the circle drop-off lane in front of her school. She shoves the back door open and slams it behind her. When she takes off running, her backpack bobs against her skinny body, and I just lose my shit.

I drop my face to my hands as hot, salty tears stream down my cheeks.

“Oh, Bernie,” Aaron murmurs, reaching out and brushing hair back from my face. I can hear in his words how much he hates to see me hurt. So even though parents are honking behind us, and we really should get moving, he unbuckles his seat belt so he can lean over and give me a hug that’s so tight it almost hurts.

That’s what I love most about him: he always has the emotional capacity to give when I’m feeling empty inside.

“Hey,” he says after a few minutes, when most of the other cars have zoomed around us cussing and screaming and flipping us off. No joke, parents of school-age kids are fucking cray. “I have something I want to give you.”

I look over at him, and I see on his face that this is something serious. It’s not like when Hael tells me he wants to ‘give me something’ and then flashes his dick. Which, I might add, he’s done twice in the last week.

“What?” I ask, but Aaron just shakes his head, running his fingers through his chestnut hair as he sits back in his seat and puts the Bronco in drive. It starts to rain on our way home, fat droplets that turn into hail about a half a block from the house.

The Harley and the Camaro are still parked out front which tells me everyone is still here.

I like that, the rain and the company and feeling cozy in Aaron’s house while Heather is safe at school.

I wipe my tears away with the sleeves of Cal’s sweatshirt, but as soon as Aaron and I walk through the front door, Oscar’s eyes snap to mine and I can tell he knows I’ve been crying. Dick-face, I think at him, because I just don’t have the energy to argue.

“You okay, Blackbird?” Hael asks as I pass by the kitchen and find him cooking eggs in nothing but his boxer shorts from last night. I nod, but I don’t bother to explain, intent on following Aaron up the stairs and into his bedroom.

He closes the door behind us as my breath quickens.

This is his room in this house, but it’s almost mine. Since we’ve officially gotten back together, if I sleep in here, he usually does, too. Before that, he either slept in the room with the bunk beds or on the floor in the girls’ room. Even when he was ignoring me and acting like I was an imposition in his life, he was being accommodating.

“You didn’t bring me all the way up here just to ask me to suck your dick, did you?” I joke, but Aaron just gives me a tight-lipped smile.

“Nope,” he says, opening his closet door and digging through the random shit that’s packed inside of it. There’s some old sports equipment, dirty clothes, action figures that he probably hasn’t touched since he was ten years old. I smile and cross my arms over my chest, leaning my shoulder against the wall next to the door.

Aaron clears the crap out of his way, uncovering a small shelving unit in the corner. It’s one of those plastic ones you can get at any department store, with little pull-out drawers stuffed with odds and ends. He opens the bottom one and extracts a small cardboard box.

“What is that?” I ask as he rises to his feet and turns to face me, holding the box close to his chest. Aaron closes his eyes for a moment, like he’s trying to prepare himself for what he’s about to do. My pulse starts to race, and I push up from the wall. “Aaron Atlas …” I warn as he finally opens his beautiful eyes up to look at me.

“We’ve been keeping these for years,” he says, still clutching the box. “I probably should’ve given them to you sooner, but I didn’t want you to get the wrong idea. With all my heart, I truly wanted you to leave and make a life somewhere else, a life without blood and guns and dead bodies.” He hands the box over to me and our tattooed fingers tangle together into a very pretty picture. “But now that you’re here, I may as well give you the world—even if it’s not the exact one I had in mind.”

“What is this, Aaron?” I ask, feeling a drop of sweat slide down my spine. I’m afraid to open the box and see what’s inside.

“Just open it,” he commands me, and because I’m damn-near positive that whatever is in this box is going to shake me, I sit down on the floor. Aaron joins me, and I’m reminded of that one time we played spin the bottle with just the two us, so we’d have an excuse to kiss each other.

The box has a few cobwebs clinging to it that I swipe away with a shaking hand, carefully lifting the flaps so I can look inside.

What I see blows me the fuck away.

My breath catches, and I get so dizzy that I have to close my eyes to keep from falling over. Even sitting down, I feel unsteady.

“Bernadette,” Aaron whispers, and I open my eyes again.

Inside the box, I see a stack of old photos and a USB drive. These are all the pictures of Penelope that I thought I’d lost when the boys loaded my shit up in the backyard and set it on fire. At the time, my sister was still alive, so while I was heartbroken, I wasn’t suicidal about the whole thing. But then … Pen killed herself.

Or … was killed. I’m not sure I can ever get the answer to that particular mystery. The Thing wouldn’t have told me anyway. Even under torture, I’m not sure he would’ve shown all his cards. That’s the thing about those psychopathic narcissist types; they can literally rewrite reality in their heads and start believing their own lies.

Actually, there’s a South Park episode called “Fishsticks” that perfectly encapsulates that point.

I dump the contents onto the floor, looking for one photo in particular. My eyes are swimming with tears again, but I know that Aaron isn’t judging me. There. I find what I’m looking for: a strip of pictures from a stupid photobooth at the casino arcade. Mom and Dad used to go there to mingle with their fancy high-roller friends. I have very few memories of life before my father died, like my subconscious blocked it out to protect me.

After all, how could I keep going under the current conditions if I had memories of what life was supposed to be like? I needed to get used to the crap I’d been handed and deal. That was the only way.

“Jesus,” I murmur, looking down at Pen’s smiling face. She was only seven in this picture; I was six. We were so goddamn cute, so innocent, unspoiled and perfect. My thumb rubs across the picture, wishing I had more than just this. Wishing I had my sister back. “Killing Neil didn’t bring her back, Aaron,” I say, even though that’s a stupid statement to make. Obviously killing Neil Pence wasn’t going to resurrect my sister from the dead. “For so long, all I’ve wanted to do is hurt him, make him pay.” I look up from the photo to find Aaron watching me carefully, like he isn’t sure if he should just listen or if he should scoop me into his arms and take over, stroke my hair back, murmur sweet things in my ear. “Now that he’s gone, that it’s done … I feel empty.”