DARKNESS DESCENDED.
I walked, my leg now worryingly numb, slowly working through the snacks Melina had put in the bag for me. Regan’s message came, and with it the place of our meeting. I still didn’t know when I would be able to find Regan there. He’d said I would realize soon enough. Was he leading me somewhere to wait hopelessly for him while he picked off more of the people I loved? When I thought about his attempt to target Whitt, my whole body burned. Edward Whittacker had given up his entire life on the other side of the country to help me try to save my brother. With Vada’s help, Regan had searched through my world to find someone who I held as evidence that I was not all bad. If someone as sweet and as wholesome as Whitt could accept me, I had hope. Regan wanted to strip away that layer of me. The rage rattled in my bones at the thought of what I had almost lost.
At the corners of my mind, Regan’s plan was creeping, a shadow falling slowly. I considered that if he’d been successful in taking Whitt from me, Regan would have snuffed out a flame I’d tried to protect. Some people liked me. But take away those few deeply flawed individuals, and what was I left with? Only badness. A selfishness, callousness, aloofness that was inherent in my character, that was undeniably bad.
Take away the few good moments from my childhood, and what was left there?
Badness.
Take away the work I did for the women who came to me in my job, battered and bruised and looking for justice, and…
No.
I wasn’t going to do this to myself. I wasn’t going to let Regan get into my head.
I crossed the empty damp plains of Nungatta, the southward highway a gray streak in the distance to my left. Herds of goats lifted their heads as I approached, eyes luminescent in the dark, skittering away when I came near. My sneakers became clotted with mud and grass, which I shook off as the land became drier.
I thought about Regan’s parents. The mother he had felt no love for, the “empty shell” she had been to him. I’d heard a lot of terrible stories in my time in foster care, both the sudden violent incidents that saw children confiscated from their parents and the long, slow, drawn-out situations that did the same. I’d seen kids pockmarked with circular scars, spotted like leopards from parents who thought getting high and putting out their cigarette butts on their kids was a lark. I’d listened to the tales of kids left alone with an abusive grandparent, their parents returning to find their child completely changed, terrified, and bruised, the grandparent denying everything. I’d known kids who’d watched one parent murder the other; had listened to their whispers from across the dorm-room aisle in group homes.
Whatever had happened to Regan, it was so bad that a judge had decided it should never be known to the public, lest Regan have to suffer the humiliation of the event being revealed in his adult life. I walked and wondered what a person could possibly to do a seven-year-old that warranted that. I had some ideas, and just considering them made me sick.
I wondered if what happened to Regan had made him the monster he was deep down inside. Was he born bad, or was he taking me to the place where he had been made that way?
I had turned back toward the highway, half formulating a plan to catch a ride to the nearest town with a car-trouble story, when I spied the stone building on the edge of the next paddock. An old house with darkened windows, a car parked, still shimmering with rain. My ride to the meeting that I knew would end a life.
Regan’s or mine.