Page 5 of The Monster I Loved
My heart raced. I reached into the bucket and pulled out the cloth. The crimson liquid clung to my skin.My mother’s blood?
Hurling it to the ground, I ran inside the house. “Summer!”
No answer. No one was home.
I tried to steady my hand as I pulled the phone from my pocket to call her.
“Hey. Any news about your mom?”
Her question stunned me into silence. She’d never answered the phone like that before.
“I saw on the news they’re looking for a truck.” The woman who promised to love me continued, “Thad, are you okay?”
I wanted to see her face-to-face. “Where are you?”
“At home.”
Really, you lying piece of shit? I’m at your home.“Okay. When does your father get home from work?”
Summer took a while to reply. After seemingly searching for another lie, she added, “He went away for a while.” She knew. There was no doubt in my mind that she knew.
She was protecting him.
I ended the call, tired of the lies. Since my mom’s death, she’d held me, wiped my tears. Now what? I’d never have asked her to choose me over her father. But this was different. Her father was a killer. How long had she known?
I couldn’t process what had happened. My emotions were a mess. How could the woman I loved, the woman who’d promised to spend the rest of her life with me, lie about something so damn serious?
The anger grew inside me, and I curled my fingers into a fist. Her betrayal felt like a knife in my gut. I couldn’t just wait around for her to get back. I had to do something.
I drove straight to the police station, my mother’s blood still on my hands. That’s what they were there for, right? To putcriminals away. I told them what I’d found, my words tumbling out at full speed. To their credit, they looked horrified. Clive was apillar of society, other than his drinking habit—which had gotten out of control over the last few years.He’d been a fucking volunteer fireman, for God’s sake. That wasn’t the kind of man who’d leave a woman alone to die, right? Even if he was drunk.
An hour later, I was standing on Summer’s front porch behind the police as they arrested her father.
After they carted him away, I left it in their hands, confident that Clive would get what was coming to him.
But they said he wasn’t a flight risk. He was a good man who’d made a mistake. He didn’t need to stay behind bars until his court date. That would be unfair, wouldn’t it?
But what about me? What about my mother?
I left Summer a voicemail calling her a lying piece of shit—not my finest insult—and told her I never wanted to set eyes on her again. I froze her out. Ghosted her. She didn’t take the hint. She called and left voicemails and texts. She turned up at my house and camped out on the front lawn. She apologized over and over again. Her father didn’t mean to. He wasn’t a bad man. It was an accident. Accidents happened. She was so sorry; so was Clive. Please, please, please, could I forgive her? She hadn’t technically lied, she said. She just hadn’t told me the truth. She didn’t want to lose her dad. He was all she had.
I ignored her attempts.
As far as I was concerned, she’d chosen her side. She’d chosen my mother’s killer and then lied about it.
A few days after his arrest, he was walking the streets like nothing had happened. Like he hadn’t left my mother to die, alone and scared. Our family lawyer told me they would likely drop the charges. It wasobvious, they said, that it had been an accident.
That did it.
On Halloween, I decided I needed to see him face-to-face. Clive had to pay for what he’d done. If the law wasn’t going to do its job, I’d do it instead.
I drove to their house dressed as a real-life monster: a grieving son out for revenge. Nobody was going to leave my mother for dead and tell me they were sorry. Fuck that!
Kids were trick-or-treating, walking around dressed as cowboys, aliens, and princesses. They didn’t know that my life was over. They didn’t know that some bastard had treated my mother like she was nothing. I had to slam on my brakes a few times to avoid hitting children darting around and trying to collect as much candy as their bags could hold.
Clive was outside his house handing the neighborhood children Halloween candies. He had painted his face like a joker. I walked up the dark driveway with my gun drawn, not bothering to hide it. My hood was up. My face was hidden in shadow.
“Oh, don’t shoot me. You can have all the candy,” he joked until the porch light hit my face, revealing that I was a true monster.
