The Bitter Season (Kovac and Liska, #5)(96)

“You’re so weak,” she sneered, and walked away, leaving him on the filthy carpet that reeked of old cat piss.

She didn’t love him. After all he’d done for her all their lives, that was the truth: She didn’t love him. She wasn’t capable of loving him the way he loved her.

It wasn’t the first time she’d beaten him. But somehow Charlie felt with terrible dread that it was the last time. He always felt that way, he reminded himself. Every time Diana said she was through with him, he believed her. Then her mood would change like the wind, and she’d accept him as if nothing had ever happened.

It wouldn’t be that way this time, he thought as he came back to the present and stared at himself in the mirror. The common cause that had bound them to each other was gone. Their common enemy was dead. He could feel the last of the bolts loosening as the shuddering vehicle that had held the family hurtled toward the inevitable crash.

With their parents gone, there was no reason for their alliance. Diana didn’t need him. She was no more capable of loving him than their father had been—which was ironic, considering she and Lucien shared not one drop of blood. Perhaps she had been Lucien Chamberlain’s perfect daughter after all.

Charlie felt as if his heart had been crushed inside his chest. He tried to tell himself he was wrong, that he always plunged into the darkest depths of depression after one of these fights with Diana. But the panic was stronger than the logic. He was shaking with it. This was the end.

They would be connected by the funeral, by the disbursal of the estate. Then what? Then nothing. Diana had already begun to plaster over their past in her mind. She would erase him, spin out of his orbit, and abandon him. The story of his life.

He had been her anchor, the hand brake on her recklessness. She wanted to be free of him now. She would destroy herself or be destroyed without him to protect her, and he would be left without the one person he had ever loved. Their family would cease to exist.

The idea terrified him, and yet, in the deepest, darkest corner of his heart he had to acknowledge what he had always secretly believed: They never should have existed in the first place.

They were four random individuals who had been brought together by whatever unseen force ruled the universe, thrown together by fate or karma; a social experiment in cruelty and mental illness staged for the amusement of some sadistic deity.

And now it was over. Now it would end. They would end.

He didn’t want to live to see it.





29


Alice: How long is forever?

White Rabbit: Sometimes, just one second.

How terrible and true that was, Jennifer thought, even if it wasn’t really a quote from the book.

She had spent the latter part of her afternoon helping a twelve-year-old girl search for the origins of the lines she had read in a Facebook meme. The lines had been attributed to Lewis Carroll, but only on social media, which the girl’s teacher would not consider a real source. She was working on an art project that had to reference a literary work, and she had chosen Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as her inspiration. Even though Jennifer knew of several verifiable references to time in the novel, the girl stubbornly wanted the one they couldn’t corroborate.

When Jennifer suggested that the girl actually read the book first, she was very rudely dismissed.

I hope your teacher makes you read it and it gives you nightmares, you nasty little bitch, Jennifer had thought, in no mood to be dealing with the public. Her visit from the police detective had rattled her and set her nerves on edge.

She didn’t want to think about her childhood or her father’s murder, or anything else from that time. She had worked too hard to pull herself out of the dark place she’d struggled in for too many years. It should have been over by now. People should have left it alone. Twenty-five years later, what did it matter? No one could bring him back to life. No one should have to pay for his death. That was how she felt.

How long is forever?

Sometimes, just one second . . .

One second was all it took to change everything. One second to see the wrong thing. One second to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. One second to discover that your deepest-held truth was the darkest kind of lie. Her childhood had been shattered in a series of one-second increments. The second it took to open a door. The seconds it took to overhear a conversation. The second it took for a bullet to end a life.

How long is forever?

One second after the next, after the next, after the next . . .

Her mother had quickly lost patience with Jennifer’s mental fragility after the murder. She believed the mourning period should end as soon as the dirt was thrown on the grave and the last solicitous friends and relatives left the church basement reception. Her mother was not a sentimental person. Daddy was hardly cold in the ground when she officially started dating Uncle Duff. Life moved on for Barbie Duffy. She didn’t understand why it wasn’t the same for her oldest daughter, who was just a child.

She didn’t understand, and Jennifer would never explain it to her. The things she knew, she held inside. The caustic nature of those memories continuously ate away at her. No one tried hard enough or cared deeply enough to pry them out. It took her years to let go, to forgive herself, to climb out of the depression and anxiety that gripped her, and move on with her life. Tonight she felt like she had fallen all the way back to the bottom of the mountain.