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Laughter rose over my anguish, bringing me up from the darkness of this room for a moment as I listened to my family enjoying a great-smelling dinner without me. I’d sat here for hours, turned page after page of this album, but still I couldn’t love her. Couldn’t even like her. Couldn’t even want to unless she could promise to bring my Ara back.

Nothing that Vicki or Mike had said really mattered to me now. For it to matter, I would have to care about this girl to begin with. And I just didn’t. Not while she was holding my Ara hostage.

I sat back with my head against the books behind me and looked at the dark courtyard, only then remembering the smears of blood I’d washed from my hands after I hurt her. It was all a blur to me, everything that happened after, and my only real concern right now was whether the beating I gave her had, in fact, brought my Ara out from hiding. But if it had, she would be in here with me.

I could hear the bath running upstairs, hear Ara laughing with Harry. I was glad she’d gotten over it enough to play mommy tonight, because I was clearly not in a fit state to be a dad. Mike was right. I needed to get this under control, but not so much for her sake, or mine. But for Harry’s. And Elora’s. My biggest shame was hearing the disappointment in my daughter’s voice on the phone tonight, knowing that if Emily hadn’t stopped me when she did, I would have actually done worse to Ara. And she would have let me. It still eluded me, the reason she did that. What did she hope to gain by letting me hurt her? Attention? Maybe. But that didn’t seem like her at all.

The door opened a crack then and the hallway light came on, casting a ribbon of yellow across the room. I squinted against it, turning my face away.

“Hi.”

The voice surprised me. I didn’t think she’d ever talk to me again. “Hi.”

“What you lookin’ at?” she asked.

“Um…” I smoothed my hand across the cover. “Photo album.”

“Can I see?” she asked, closing the door behind her. It went dark again and, in this light, I felt safer to look at her.

I put the album on the ground and slid it over so she wouldn’t sit directly beside me. But she did anyway—she just picked it up and positioned herself right by my knee, her legs crossed like a child on a story mat.

I inched my leg away, my skin crawling. If this feeling was a result of that curse, it was a nasty, horrible curse. I had to wonder if I’d feel this way otherwise, and when I looked at her as she opened the book and smiled at the first picture, I realized I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t hate her this much. Ever. How could I?

But with that realization came a flood of guilt that made my chest heavy, because I also would never have hurt her like that. Now, it had been done, and there was nothing in this world that could undo it.

“I’ve never seen any pictures of the wedding,” she said quietly.

I leaned in to look too, noting that she didn’t say ‘our wedding’ or ‘your wedding’. “Can you see them alright in the dark?”

She just laughed, making a point of the obvious. I missed my vampire eyesight then. I’d been looking at silhouettes all night mostly, but I knew them all so well that I didn’t need to see to know what was on each page.

“Who’s this?” She pointed to the man on her arm as she walked across her backyard in her wedding dress.

“The man who raised you.” I cleared my throat. “He was Vicki’s husband.”

“Wow.” She looked right at me and then back at the photo. “I didn’t know she had a husband. I kind of didn’t really want to know anything about my life beforehand, you know, so I didn’t ask her much.”

“She wouldn’t have spoken of him anyway.”

“Why?”

“She can’t bring herself to look back on that time.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s too painful. This man”—I pointed to Greg—“he loved you like his own, and you trusted that he always would. So did Vicki. But though you knew him all your life as Greg Thompson, in truth, with all that comes with it, his name is Vampirie.”

Her eyes shot up from the picture to mine. I knew she understood what a horrible person he truly was. I knew she’d heard the stories of how he and his son tried to wipe out all Lilithians and Vampires a few years ago. “The… the Vampirie?”

I nodded, pointing to a picture of Sam. “And this was Sam.”

“Vicki’s son,” she said softly, smiling at his picture. “So her son was immortal?”

“No. He was part vampire but didn’t have immortality.”

“Oooh, and is that why he died?”

“No.” I sat back, my hands falling loosely in my lap. She didn’t get it. She hadn’t put the pieces together. “Sam was Vampirie’s son too, Ara. If he was Vicki’s son and they were married—”

“Oh my God!” She looked at me. “But Elora killed Vampirie’s son.”

I nodded.

“So… our daughter killed her own uncle?”

I nodded, running my finger along the jagged scar at my throat. “On the night he did this to me.”

Ara leaned in to examine it, and I tensed, hoping she moved back before I reflexively shoved her away. But she didn’t. Instead, she shut the wedding album and moved closer, pressing her finger to it. “Why did he try to kill you?”

I smacked her hand away. “It doesn’t matter. Any of it—”

“But it does. I mean”—she leaned back on her knees—“our daughter killed Vicki’s son. How can she have ever forgiven her for that?”

“Sam turned to the dark side long before Elora took his life, and it was foretold long before that.”

“Foretold?”

“Vampirie predicted that Elora would kill Sam. So it wasn’t a shock.”

“Oh.” Ara nodded. “Poor Vicki.”

“Poor Elora,” I added. “Sam was her uncle, remember? She loved him.”

“And that’s why Vicki couldn’t return to Loslilian,” she noted. “Way too much pain there for her.”

“Yes.” I took the wedding album and slid it back into place on the shelf, but as I pressed it in, a picture fell out.

“What’s that?” Ara asked, leaning over my shoulder.

“The lake house. We spent the summer there before… before my wife died.”

She took the picture and brought it up to her nose, her eyes gathering in every angle, every tree. “I’ve seen this before. In a dream.”

I snatched it back and slipped it between two books on the shelf. Those memories didn’t belong to her and I felt like she had no right to look at them.

She sat still for a moment, eyes in her lap, and with the house so quiet around us, she spoke in a voice that was barely a whisper. “Why do you hate me?”

I looked right at her, trying to put my feelings into words, but as time had passed while we sat here, that hatred had died down. Without it, I felt only a growing and very potent feeling of guilt. “Why didn’t you stop me from hurting you?” I countered.

Ara drew a long, slow breath, her shoulders lifting. “I don’t know.”

That piled the curiosity on in a giant heaping. I got up onto my knees and shuffled a bit closer. “Why don’t you know?”

She just shrugged, not meeting my eyes.

“Ara, is there a reason and you just don’t want to tell me?”

“I…” When she looked at me, even in the dark, I could see tears in her eyes. “I think I wanted you to do it. I wanted you to break my head so that maybe she would come back out.”

That hit me like a bullet in the heart. It felt like my body sunk through the floor. “Why? I thought you liked being you?”

“Not when it hurts you so much,” she mumbled almost incomprehensibly, wiping her cheeks. “I didn’t come here to be hated, David, and I’m sorry I don’t remember who I was. I’ve been trying so hard but—”

“Shhh.” I reached across and placed my hand on her wrist. It was all I could do. I didn’t want to touch her. I didn’t want to comfort her. I didn’t want to tell her it was okay and that she didn’t have to remember. I wanted her to be sorry. I was glad she was sorry. I felt bad that she was sorry.

“We can’t go on like this,” she said.

“I know.”

“I can’t keep hating myself for not being the girl you need me to be.”

“I know.”

“And I won’t do it again, David,” she warned. “I will never let you treat me like that again—”

“I know.”

“No. You don’t.” She pushed my hand away. “Because you hurt me today. You made me feel powerless, shocked my entire system into some sick, twisted submission and, worst of all, you made me want to die.”

My lip stiffened to hide my emotions.

“If you ever lay a hand on me again, I won’t exercise restraint because you’re human.” She slowly stood up. “I care for you, David, but I will never again let myself be treated that way. The next time you lay a hand on me, I will hurt you. And then I’ll leave. And I’ll be taking my son with me.”

“Is that a threat?”

Ara shook her head. “Call it cliché, but I’m pretty sure that was a promise.”

“What goes on between you and me has nothing to do with our children.” I stood up, towering over her. “You can’t just threaten to take off with him every time we fight.”

“That wasn’t just a fight, David!” She pointed to the courtyard. “That was outright abuse. Could have been murder if I was human. Do you have any idea how strong you are? Do you have any idea what you actually did to my head?”

I looked back at her from the courtyard. “No.”

“You made me bleed,” she said, holding my gaze, her eyes filling with tears again. “I’ve had a headache all day. The wound hasn’t healed because every vampire within four hours’ drive has other commitments today. I can’t get blood until tomorrow, and so it’s just not healing—”

“Where’s Eric?”

“He’s down south, remember—playing that gig with his band.” She pressed her hands to her head then and took a few deep breaths, clearly in pain. “You could have killed me, David—”

“Yeah, well I tried to do a lot worse,” I mumbled under my breath. She heard it though, and nodded.

“I know. And it scares me that you can be so cruel.”

“I…” I wanted to say I wasn’t usually like this, but I couldn’t tell her about the curse. She would never fall for me if she knew, and I had to admit that a part of me still wanted things to work with her. I knew what I’d done was evil and there was no excuse. I knew that if I was the kind of man that could hurt such a sweet little thing that way, then I didn’t deserve to be a father as well. I knew she’d be right to take my son.

But the kids weren’t the reason I wanted this to work. Somewhere underneath all of this hatred, I still clung to a hope that Ara would one day surface. I wanted to be in her life when that happened.

“Something very…” I couldn’t bear to say this aloud, but I knew I had to explain. “Very twisted happened to…” To her? No. “To Ara in those tombs. I…”

“I know,” she said, moving toward me. “I know how badly you need her to return. I know my forgiveness will never be enough. I know all of that, and that’s why I forgive you for what you did to me today, David, because I can sense the pain you’re in, and it’s dark and so consuming that you just need to be free of it at any cost. You just want her to come back and release you.”

Her words, as much as they were only words, unburdened me in a strange way. I rubbed my face, coming down from the cloud of hatred a little more with a slightly warmer heart toward her.

“It was desperation that I saw in your eyes today,” she added. “What happened to you both was clearly so horrific that your mind can’t cope, and holding on to that terror is literally driving you insane—”

“But I can’t talk about it, Ara, so please don’t ask that of me.”

“Okay,” she said simply. “But can I ask why you can’t talk about it?”

I looked up at her and she painted on a cheeky smile that made me smile too. “It’s like I said to you earlier,” I started, “I wanted to die after they rescued me. I planned to. I didn’t care about anything but stopping my pain. I couldn’t close my eyes without seeing what had happened. I still can’t most nights. I’ve had no closure on this because my wife is still gone. She can’t look at me and tell me it’s all right—tell me that what I did to h… that…” I fumbled. Too much had come out already. “She can’t tell me she forgives me. So I need to live, to work, to exist as if it was just a bad nightmare, or I won’t live, Ara. I just won’t be able to cope.”

“When you…” She moved a bit closer. “When you did get rescued, and you wanted to die, what made you hold on? Why did you decide to give life a chance?”

“Elora,” I said. “She found something very precious to me—something that was lost a long time ago.”

“What was it?”

“A locket,” I said, pressing my hand against my hip pocket. “It’s been a symbol of hope for me ever since—”

“Hope that your wife would come back?”

I nodded.

“And she, or rather the hope that she would come back was your only reason to live?” She nodded, understanding.

“For a very long time, yes,” I said, feeling the heart shape beneath the denim pocket, drawing comfort from it.

“And now? What keeps you alive now?”

“That’s just it.” I sat down on the back of the lounge. “I don’t even know anymore.”

As she sat down beside me, I could smell her shampoo. She smelled different to my Ara—a kind of vanilla scent—but I liked it. I liked the feel of her leg, bare under her shorts, against my jeans. I liked the feel of her hand as she picked mine up and wove her fingers through. I liked it all so much that I pulled away, shaking my head. I could see where this was going. She thought the only way to bring me back to her, the only way to make me want to live was to give me hope. To give herself to me. And I would not be a victim of such a cruel game. If she wanted to share my bed it would be because she had reached that decision from a place of love. Not guilt or fear.

“David—”

“I can’t do this.” I got up and quickly walked away.

“Can’t we just go back?” she called after me. “Can’t we just be friends again, like we used to be?”

I stopped by the door and looked back at her. “I’m trying, Ara.”

“Are you?” She stood up. “Because it seems like you’ve given up.”

“And every time I give up, I eventually realize I need to try again,” I confessed. Ara nodded as if to say she understood that on a very deep level. But of course she did. How many times had she said she hated me, that she wanted to leave and never see me again? How many times had I pushed her to the limits, and yet she was still here? I was still here. Both of us still trying for reasons neither could comprehend. Why did we do it to ourselves?

Because we had no choice. It was that simple.

A force greater than love was at play here, and it had both of us in its spiny grip: the past.

I sighed, realizing it may always be this tumultuous between us and yet, at the same time, realizing it would be able to keep us trapped here anyway.

“Just give me time, okay?”

“Okay,” she said in a breaking whisper, staying put as I left the room. I only made it to the end of the short corridor before I heard her crying.