Page 104 of Don't Call Me Daddy
My amusement is quickly replaced with dread when he reappears in front of me with my sister’s urn tucked beneath his arm.
“You ready?” he asks, passing me the urn as a wave of nausea rips through me.
I swallow a gulp, trying to ignore the ball of pain that twists in my stomach at the thought of saying goodbye, not only to my sister, but to Leo too.
“I think so …”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Leo
I stare up at the dilapidated building and press my lips into a flat line. I never thought I’d be anywhere near this place again, much less willingly walking in at night, but this is so much bigger than my stupid fear. I need to be there for Ivy. I want to be there for Ivy, to help her through this.
I don’t know when it happened exactly, when she managed to wiggle her way past the steel walls I’d put up, infiltrating my heart from the inside out. All I know now is, she’s the sun I revolve around. She’s sunny spring days and beams of sunshine that warm your skin after a bitter, cold winter that seemed to never end. She’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me. She’s everything I never knew I needed.
“Watch your step.” I take her hand and lead her through the old metal door dangling on broken hinges.
We duck inside, letting our eyes slowly adjust to the darkness—a darkness that seems almost unnatural, blacker than any night sky. I turn the flashlight from my phone on, illuminatingthe dark, dusty space as we work our way inside, the floorboards creaking underneath us with every step.
It’s so eerily quiet, I can almost hear the dust stirring in the air from our footsteps.
We move farther inside, past piles of bricks and mangled steel, stepping over rubble and debris. You can’t make out anything from the original setup, but it’s not hard to imagine how it used to look.
Ivy spins around, taking it all in. “I can’t believe this is where it all happened. How many people did you say died in the explosion?”
“Sixty-three,” I answer automatically.
The number’s been burned into my memory since I was a kid, the same number that’s haunted me from my own past. The past I never talk about.
“Didn’t you say that’s how many people died in your factory explosion too?”
I grit my teeth. “Yeah. Sixty-three.”
“That’s so ironic,” she says, squatting to pick up an old black-and-white photo.
In the picture, a young woman beams as a man stands behind her, his arms wrapped around her playfully as he kisses her cheek. They look so happy, so in love. It’s probably an engagement photo, if I had to guess. Their smiling faces are like a punch straight to the gut.
“Do you think they knew? Before it happened?”
I turn to Ivy, confused by her question.
She pulls at her hair—her tell that she’s nervous or uncomfortable. “I just mean, my sister used to say that people have a sixth sense about when death is near, like a way to help prepare them or whatever.” She shrugs. “Fern knew. She told me two days before she died. She’d actually just gotten some really great news about her levels. The doctors thought she was goinginto remission, but she knew. She predicted it down to the hour.” She bites her thumbnail nervously.
I kick the dirt at my feet, unable to look her in the eyes. “I don’t know. Part of me hopes they didn’t know …”
“Yeah. Me too.” Her voice is small and quiet, like we’re both talking about something else entirely.
Not a day goes by that I don’t think of the people who lost their lives because of my negligence. If I could go back in time, I’d do so many things differently. But that’s the thing; I can’t. I’ve done everything I can to try to atone for my mistakes. With my own personal funds, I paid their families a generous settlement, as well as a monthly stipend for the next fifty years, and I’ve tripled our company’s safety requirements.
Torturing myself isn’t going to bring anyone back to life, but maybe it’s possible to remember them without the soul-crushing guilt I’ve been carrying.
For the first time in my life, it’s like I can see a light at the end of the tunnel, but the light isn’t some mystical thing; it’s Ivy and her rays of sunshine slicing through the edges of my darkness. It hardly feels like a coincidence that I’d meet her while walking alone in the woods at night, and at this point, divine intervention seems like a better explanation than happenstance.
“What’s that over there?” She points to a hatch door leading to the bunker below.
My chest pinches at the sight of it. Swallowing a gulp, I say, “It’s a bunker; it was supposed to be a safe space to protect people in the event of an accident …” I trail off, and the unsaid words hang in the air between us.
I open the door, revealing the top of the metal ladder, and shine my flashlight, illuminating the narrow space below. “It connects to the cave underground. They built a tunnel system so they’d have access to both sides. It’s … actually the exact spot where the Phantom allegedly appeared.”
