Page 47 of The Shadow

“Sounds like the kind of problems I would have loved to have,” Aspen says and I agree.

“But then it all changed. Maybe I was oblivious at that point. I was seventeen, in high school, preoccupied with my own relationship drama.” I roll my eyes at how trivial it seems now. “My mom came home one day, blindsiding him out of the blue as my dad would later say, and said she wanted a divorce. She had met someone else, our insurance guy, Gary Flowers. She was in love with him and there was nothing my dad could say that would change it.”

“Oh my God, what did you think when all that happened?”

“Honestly, I took my dad’s side at first. I thought they were happy, but according to my mom, they hadn’t been happy for years. I didn’t understand. I asked her why she didn’t tell him earlier, give him a chance to work on things and fix it. I was so naive.” I take a second to gather myself. “But when things started to progress with the divorce and my dad realized she wasn’t just ‘doing it for attention’ as he’d often say, it was like the gloves came off and I saw who he really was for the first time.”

Aspen twists so that she can look back at me. “I’m sorry,” she says softly. “I know that feeling.”

“I started talking more to my mom about what he was like before and that’s when the real illusion shattered. The illusion that we were a happy family. Little did I know, my mom was covering for him, but behind closed doors he was a controlling, manipulative liar who threatened her. So I confronted him.”

“Your poor mom,” she whispers. “What’d he say when you did?”

“He lost it. Literally unhinged. He started stalking my mom and me, feeling the hood of her car to see if it was warm. I had moved in with her and Gary at that time and I installed cameras which caught this behavior. I knew I’d be enlisting as soon as I turned eighteen, so I just had to get through the next six months. I thought that once the courts heard my mom’s complaints when she filed a restraining order that my dad would snap out of it. I tried talking to him but there was no reasoning. He started losing sleep and saying crazy shit, shit that”—my voice catches in my throat—“shit I should have taken seriously.”

Aspen wraps her arms around me tighter, her cheek against my chest.

“I just never thought… I never thought my dad would do this. That day when I came home from football practice and found Gary dead in the kitchen and my mom barely clinging to life a few feet from him, it was like all of my adolescence was gone in a flash.” I close my eyes, reliving that moment as if it was yesterday. “I can still hear my mom’s shallow breath as I held her in my arms. She waited until she could tell me one last time that she loved me and then—she was gone.”

Aspen doesn’t say a word, she doesn’t need to. Her arms are squeezing me as the tears begin to flow down my cheeks.

“He waited too… until she told me those words and that’s when I heard the hammer cock. I looked up just as my dad lifted the gun and shot me.” Her arms squeeze me tighter, a small sob coming from her lips. “I managed to lunge toward him and kick the gun away. I ran to get it but my dad ran out the back door. I panicked. I couldn’t leave my mom, even if she was already gone. I couldn’t so I stayed until I finally called the cops.”

Finally, she lifts herself from me, my shirt and her cheeks stained with tears. “Did they catch him?”

I shake my head. “He was a Ranger in the Army for years, my inspiration for wanting to join the military actually. When the cops went to his house, they found that he’d been planning this for months. He already had a bug-out bag and everything he needed to go off grid, full survival mode for however long he needed.”

“How’d you find him?”

“I waited,” I say, thinking about how my desire for revenge was fueled by nothing but white-hot rage for my father. “Patiently for a very long time. I enlisted, stayed focused, and channeled every bit of anger I had into making myself a killing machine that someday he wouldn’t be able to outsmart or outrun.”

“And that’s what you did,” she says, reaching out to stroke my face.

“That’s exactly what I did. I spent every spare second and resource I had tracking him, hunting him until I found him, and then I came up with a plan to annihilate him, the same way he annihilated my mother and Gary.”

Her eyes scan my face like she’s trying to find an answer to a question she hasn’t asked yet. “Did he know? In the end, did he know that it was you?”

“Yeah. I made sure he did. I made sure he was looking me in the eyes when I pulled the trigger. I wanted my face to be the last one he saw so that he would leave this life remembering what he did to my mom.”

“Did anyone know?”

“No,” I reassure her. “He was living in a foreign country at the time, using a fake name and a fake passport from a different foreign country.”

“And what about when the local authorities found his body? Did they tie him back to being a US citizen on the run?”

I look down at her lying on my chest, brushing her hair behind her ear.

“They didn’t find his body or his belongings. I made sure they never will.”

“Do you”—her eyes shift—“do you struggle with guilt at all?”

That’s something I didn’t ask her. Something I’m guessing she must struggle with, although she has zero reason to.

“I do,” I admit. “Guilt for not doing it earlier. Maybe if I had, my mom would still be alive.”

She sits up suddenly. “Harvey, you know that’s not fair to do to yourself.”

“Doesn’t matter, I still do it. I know it’s not logical and had I killed him before he killed her, I’d be in prison. I know it doesn’t make sense, but that’s the reality I live in, Aspen, and that’s why I won’t let you do this alone. I know we both understand loss, baby.” I press my forehead against hers. “And now that I’ve found you, found this, what we have, I won’t risk losing it.”

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