Page 128 of Her Ex-Husband's Brother

Every time Mom cried and Jake stood behind her with his arms folded, looking at me like I had done something to both of them by having teenage feelings and grief about Dad that was too big and wild for their comfortable realm of “normal.”

Every time I swallowed the fury and called it self-control because I was terrified that if I let even one part of it out, everyone would point and say, there,see, we told you.Violent maniac.

When really, the whole time,theywere the would-be murderers.

So yes, the first punch is for Lennon.

The second one is all for me.

It lands harder.

Jake grunts, body jolting under me, and blood spills over his teeth when he smiles.

Smiles.

“Oh, come on,” he says, breath thin. “This is all you’ve ever wanted. To beat the shit out of me.”

His words crawl under my skin because in some ways, he knows me. He always knew how to find a kernel of truth to make me second guess myself. It’s what makes him so sinister.

My hand tightens in his shirt.

“You took her.”

“I saved my wife from my lunatic brother.”

My vision flashes red at the edges.

He’s still daring to call her his wife? The woman he just put hands on as she scratched and screamed to get away from him?

“You poisoned her,” I scream, and my voice doesn’t sound like mine. I’m so full of rage at his hypocrisy and how he betrayed both of us. His own fuckingfamily.

Jake laughs, ugly and wet. “Listen to yourself.”

There it is.

The old spell.

For a second, I am fifteen again. Sixteen. Twenty. Twenty-seven. All of them at once.

I’m standing in a hallway with Mom crying behind a closed door and Jake telling me I need help.

I’m sitting under fluorescent lights while strangers ask whether I’m a danger to others or myself, and I sob, broken, because I didn’t know. They’d told me so often I was, I couldn’t tell which way was up or down anymore. All I could hear was the silence where Dad used to be, and looking at a body I was too young to find and too late to save.

Listen to yourself, August.

Do you hear how you sound?

This is what we mean.

I scream out in feral rage.

My fist draws back again.

It’s so tempting to fuckingendhim, once and for all. Then his worm-tongue will never poison anyone ever again.

Lennon slides out of the truck on the driver’s side because her door must be jammed against the culvert.

She half falls through the cab, one knee going into the mud.