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Prologue
When I was eight years old, my mother tried to kill me.
For twenty years, I’ve wondered why.
What did I do wrong?
What caused her to hate me so much to want me, her only child, erased from this world?
What would have happened if she hadn’t drunk the poisoned lemonade—of her own making—out of the yellow cup with white daisies printed on it that hadalwaysbelonged to me?
Not a day has gone by that I haven’t watched my dull gray-blue eyes and chestnut-brown hair staring back at me in the mirror as I asked myself these questions.
Hereyes.Herhair.
The only piece of my father that stares back at me is a splash of soft freckles that graces my features. My father always said that they were like the constellations in the sky and that these were our very own versions of the Big Dipper and Little Dipper. That we would always be together, shining brightly side by side.
At least, he used to say that...until the day my mother ruined everything and overturned our entire world with a heartless act of malevolence.
We weren’t the same after that. Nothing was ever the same again.
I spent the rest of my childhood surrounded by ghosts. Walking the halls of the Crane Manor, a large manor house my father inherited from his father years before I was born. When it was just him and mother, surrounded in wedded bliss.
Did my birth take that magic away from them?
Did I become nothing more than an afterthought? Is that why my mother thought it would be best for me to just disappear from this world?
These are questions that have haunted my every waking thought, and followed me into every nightmare.
I try my best to remember the happy moments we shared as mother and daughter.
Because I know she loved me; I know it.
She used to read me stories before bedtime. Every night, we would pick a different book, a different genre—because Mom said I needed to be a well-rounded reader if I ever wanted to write novels of my own one day, like her.
My favorites were always the stories that made things go bump in the night. The ones that let your imagination run wild...making you second guess every noise in the house.
Is there a person in the hallway coming to murder me, or is that loud creak of the floorboard just Horton, our orange tabby cat, chasing away another mouse?
Is that a tree branch scraping the outside of the house, or is it a sharp-clawed monster coming to steal me away from my parents in the dead of night?
You know, the stories that make you feel like there were eyes on you while you were tucked in tightly into the pink-tufted bedspread, waiting with bated breath for something sinister to grab you by your uncovered feet to drag you under the bed.
Those were always my favorite. Not because I loved the dark and scary things, but because most nights, Mom would let me sneak into bed with her. She would hold me close all night long, keeping me safe in the embrace of her arms. Waking up and inhaling the scent of that White Diamonds perfume she always wore while being snuggled in tightly between her and Dad—those were the best nights.
My favorite nights.
Until it was all ripped away from me—from us. Leaving a hole of nothingness and darkness where my heart was supposed to be.
Instead of being wrapped in my mother’s arms, I was being wrapped in the yellow wool throw blanket that belonged on the back of the couch. The same one we laid down in the yard under the weeping willow tree to have our family picnic on.
One moment I was sitting across from my parents, having an impromptu picnic breakfast with them because Dad had called off work and insisted on joining us for the day.
A real family breakfast, he called it.
Not the rush of workboots and waffles being tossed back and forth as they popped out of the toaster oven.
The next thing I knew, I was being rushed back into Crane Manor, my childhood home, by a policeman that I didn’t know, while being chased by the screams of my father.
