Morgan shivered. She’d been cold since leaving Hudson’s house the day before. Invisible pins punctured her skin as though she were a voodoo doll. It didn’t matter how many scalding showers she took. The winter was inside her, freezing her from the inside out.
She sat in her parents’ basement, burritoed in a pilled blanket, surrounded by Eleanor’s albums and bathed in the ruby glow of her lava lamp. Loose prints were stacked in neat, symmetrical piles. Leather albums whose covers were worn by time lay closed, each one waiting to be read like a book.
Morgan selected a print from the top of the pile and pinched it between her fingers. A sudden tremor caused it to shake like a dead leaf on a branch. He looked like them. Clive. The man who had made her and left her. He’d swaddled her in wool and then abandoned her to the wolves. She studied this picture of him at a black-tie affair, holding a martini, Eleanor a vision beside him, and wondered, Had he been one of them? Well dressed and inconspicuous, he looked like everyone who’d ever paid her a visit at The Ruins—corporate moguls who loosened their ties and went to abuse someone on their way home from work. She imagined him with a black hood over his head, touched his neck where she would have seared the mark.
She didn’t realize she’d crumpled the photograph until she felt the cramp in her hand. Her nails dug into her palm. Morgan unfurled her fingers, revealing the ruined picture.
She tore it in half, then. And quarters. Ripped it again and again until it was a mosaic that could not be pieced back together. She sprinkled the shards on the floor. Her heart pounded. She could feel her pulse beating in her throat. Her blood warmed with the electric current that coursed through her veins.
Now, Morgan stared at the shreds of paper on the floor, piled up like the dirty slush that lined the curbs outside. Her gaze drifted across her desk, where stacks of more memories waited to be scanned. Hurt welled inside her.
Her hand hovered over one. She grabbed the top-most photograph. It was another one of Clive and a young Bennett at the pond, kneeling behind a row of fish spread out on the dock. In the background was a little shed, a stack of firewood leaning against it. Bennett smiled, missing his two front teeth as he held up an invisible line with a bluegill hooked in the mouth. Clive’s arm was around him. To their right, dragged up onto the bank, she recognized the canoe from the negatives. The one in which Clive had held her and whispered baseless nothings in her ear. A whimper escaped her mouth. She sounded like a wounded animal.
She tore the picture of Clive and Bennett in half. Quartered it. Scattered it on the floor. The piles were uneven now. Biting her lip, Morgan grabbed a picture from the top of the next pile, this one of Clive pressing his thumb to the nozzle of a hose while Cora and Carlisle danced in their swimsuits. She ripped it. Scattered it. Grabbed the next one.
A trail of tears burned down her neck and soaked into her shirt as she destroyed one after another of the Reynoldses’ memories. A silent scream welled up inside her. She hated Clive. Hated him for leaving her to rot in a room while he traveled the world with his other family. While they toured Roman ruins in Bath, she was being ruined in a house of horrors in exchange for cigarettes and little blue pills. And while they fed little lambs in the emerald hills of Galway, she was a little lamb being fed to the wolves. While they lay atop matching blue-striped beach towels on the white sands of Mykonos, she curled into a fetal position on a hardwood floor, praying her door would remain shut for the night.
How could he have abandoned her? His own blood. His flesh.
His ruin.
Suddenly, everything stilled. Her chest heaving, Morgan looked around her. Little shards everywhere. Kindling.
Dread bloomed in the pit of her stomach, paralyzed her. Eleanor’s photos were destroyed beyond repair. She couldn’t explain this. Warmed by her hatred of herself and for the villain she had become, Morgan threw herself on her desk, her body racked by sobs. She couldn’t face them now, or at the cabin, or ever again. As if the Reynoldses hadn’t had a trying enough past, she’d gone and obliterated every glimmer of a happy memory within it.
Clive and Bern were right. She was a ruin. Fragile like a bomb, she destroyed everything she touched.
When she finally peeled herself off her keyboard, bits of paper stuck to her arms and forehead, she shot an email off to Bennett. I can’t make it to the cabin. I’m so sorry, explain later.
She wouldn’t, of course, explain later. She would never talk to him again. Besides, she didn’t belong at the cabin, with him. He was her brother. Well, half brother.
Morgan dragged her arm across her mouth, wiping away tears and mucus. She drank in deep breaths, attempting to compose herself. She had to clean up this mess.
From upstairs, a knock sounded at the door. She knew it was Hudson before her mom even called down to her.