Chapter 2

Three hours before I limped into that clinic, I was scrolling Facebook on a break at work.

A post was going viral. Already thousands of shares. I scrolled because I was bored. I scrolled because my feet hurt and I had twenty minutes before the lunch rush.

Then I saw it.

"My son dated a normal little girl back in high school. I didn't stop them. I just used a few small tricks and ruined the girl. My son watched his own girlfriend rot in front of him. He got disgusted. He broke up with her. Now he's safe at home, doing big things. This is what every great mother does for her son."

Marlene.

After nine years, she's still bragging.

The comments were a war zone. Thousands of strangers calling her a monster. Thousands more cheering her on. *Smart mom. Saved her son from a gold digger.*

I read it twice. I waited for something to happen in my chest.

Nothing happened.

I turned off my phone. I went back to wiping tables.

It used to take everything in me not to scream when I thought about her. Now I can read a public confession of what she did to me and feel — nothing. Just tired.

That's what nine years of pills and broken sleep does. It hollows you out. It takes the rage and the love and the fear and grinds them into the same gray dust.

My boss looked at me funny.

"Wendy. You okay?"

"Fine."

"You still going to the clinic after shift?"

"Yeah."

She nodded. She didn't ask whose baby. She knew better than to ask.

I finished my shift. I caught the bus to the clinic across town. The smaller one. The one nobody I know goes to. The one I used to come to all the time as a kid.

I limped up the steps. I signed in. I sat down with the slip in my hand.

A nurse called my name. I followed her down the hall to the exam room.

I pushed the door open.

The doctor had his back to me. White coat. Tall. Shoulders too wide.

He turned around.

And nine years of gray dust caught fire all at once.

Jesse Marlow.

Back in the same little human clinic he used to work at, before his father's pack came in their black SUVs and took him away.

He'd come back.

Of course he had. The universe had one more joke to play on me.

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