This is the preview of the Upcoming improved version of my Trans Novella “Burn the Dogwood”. Version 1 is and will remain available on Scribble Hub for all to read. But Version 2 is an expanded and improved edition, now with my illustrations included inline throughout the story. This is a sample of how V2 is going to look in the end when I give all 9 chapters the proper treatment. That version will be available for sale on my Itch.io (And potentially elsewhere…)
For now, ON WITH THE SHOW!
TRIGGER WARNINGS:
- Gender dysphoria
- Dissociation and night terrors
- Panic attacks
- Self-harm
- Trauma and abuse
- Transphobia
Prologue: The Invitation
The scream tore her throat raw before she even realized it belonged to her. Darla May LeMonte woke with a violent, gasping heave, her body snapping upright as if breaking the surface of a frozen lake. Her hands flew to her own neck, her manicured acrylic nails scraping frantically against her collarbone, desperately trying to loosen a phantom silk tie that wasn’t there.
Stand up straight. Shoulders back. Chest out. The baritone voice echoed in the hollow space between her ears, loud and demanding, accompanied by the suffocating, acidic smell of lemon floor wax and pubescent sweat. Darla squeezed her eyes shut and forced herself to drag in a ragged breath of the over-conditioned, stale air of her apartment on the west side of Jacksonville, Florida.
When she opened her eyes, the oppressive mahogany of her nightmare dissolved into the dark, cramped familiarity of their spare bedroom.
She was completely tangled in the thin, cheap sheets of the guest bed, the fabric twisted around her legs like a straitjacket. She was shivering, drenched in a cold sweat that made her oversized sleep-shirt cling uncomfortably to her chest. She didn’t remember leaving the warmth of the master bedroom. She didn’t remember throwing the covers off or stumbling blindly down the short hallway. Her brain had simply short-circuited in the face of the terror, unmooring her consciousness and letting someone else in her body blindly flee the phantom threat, only letting her boot back up once she had safely cornered herself in the furthest room of the apartment.
It was a survival mechanism that was becoming terrifyingly frequent. She isolated herself so that when the ghost of Mr. LeMonte violently tried to repossess her in her sleep, so she wouldn’t accidentally strike out and hurt Skye.
Darla pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes until she saw stars. She focused on the mechanical, rattling hum of the window AC unit. She focused on the faint, amber glow of the streetlamp bleeding through the cheap plastic blinds.
I am Darla, she repeated the mantra silently, a desperate, frantic code compiling in her head. I am thirty-four. I am a woman. I am safe. She repeated it over and over again in a desperate attempt to convince herself that the entire phrase was true.
The floorboards out in the hallway groaned.
Darla flinched, her spine instantly locking into a rigid, defensive posture before she could stop it. A heavy, familiar silhouette appeared in the doorway, illuminated by the harsh, yellow glow of the bathroom down the hall.
Skye stood there, leaning heavily against the doorframe. Her girlfriend of nearly 2 years was wearing a faded grey tank top and boyshort panties, her dark hair a messy, chaotic tangle around her shoulders. But it was her posture that made Darla’s stomach drop. This woman, who normally stood like a warrior ready to take on the world, looked utterly, bone-wearily defeated. Her broad shoulders were slumped, and her dark eyes were heavy with the specific, helpless exhaustion of watching someone you love nearly drown to death of a mysterious sorrow every single night.
The moment Darla saw Skye’s face, the core programming of her childhood kicked in. The terrified, shivering prey animal was instantly buried beneath a desperate, frantic need to manage the room, to smooth the waters, to ensure she wasn’t taking up unapproved emotional space.
“Hi honey! Sorry! I’m so, so sorry,” Darla blurted out, her voice pitching up an octave into a sweet, apologetic trill. She immediately began frantically untangling herself from the sheets, forcing a bright, Customer Service smile onto her pale, tear-streaked face. “Did I wake you? Oh, gosh golly, I was trying so hard to be quiet. I’m so sorry, sweetheart.”
Skye didn’t move. She just watched Darla frantically smooth the wrinkles out of the cheap duvet, trying to manufacture order out of the chaos.
“You were screaming again, Muffin,” Skye said, her voice a low, gravelly rasp of sleep and concern. “Loud enough to wake the whole fucking neighborhood.”
Darla let out a high, breathy laugh that sounded completely hollow. She tucked a strand of her damp, golden-brown bob behind her ear, sitting on her hands to hide their violent trembling. “Well, I’m not sure who was screaming, but it definitely wasn’t me. You know I don’t have the lung capacity for that.”
Skye let out a long, heavy sigh. It wasn’t born of malice or anger, but it cut Darla deeper than a shout ever could. It was the sound of complete helplessness. Skye crossed her arms, her knuckles white against her biceps.
“You don’t have to hide, Darla,” Skye said softly, the blunt force of the truth piercing straight through Darla’s manicured defenses. “Not from me. You’re allowed to be terrified. You don’t have to pretend you’re fine.”
Darla’s breath hitched. The urge to break down, to fall into Skye’s strong arms and sob until she dehydrated, was overwhelming. If I fall apart, Darla thought, the panic rising hot and fast in her throat, she’s going to realize how broken I actually am. She’s going to realize I’m too heavy to carry.
“I really am fine! Just a bad dream, that’s all,” Darla chirped, standing up so quickly she swayed on her feet. She wrapped her arms tightly around her own waist, shrinking her shoulders forward to make her footprint in the room as small as physically possible. She kept her eyes glued to the scuffed laminate floor, unable to meet Skye’s heavy gaze.
“I’m just going to go wash my face,” Darla continued, her words spilling out in a rapid, practiced rush. “You go back to bed, please. Don’t lose any more sleep over me. I promise I’m okay.”
Darla didn’t wait for a response. She scurried past Skye in the doorway, keeping her head tucked down, a ghost fleeing the light. She hurried down the hall and clicked the bathroom door shut behind her, effectively locking herself in, and locking Skye out.
Darla leaned over the bathroom sink, gripping the cold porcelain until her knuckles ached. She stared at her own reflection, pale, tear-streaked, and wild-eyed. “You are Darla,” she whispered, her voice trembling in the harsh light. “You are thirty four-years old.” But her eyes darted to the door at the slightest groan of the pipes in the walls, her body coiled like a spring ready to snap. She tried to force a smile, but it looked like a grimace. “You are a woman,” she said to the cold mirror, jumping when the refrigerator in the kitchen clicked on outside the door. “Y-you are….S-safe..”
She eventually drifted back to the master bedroom, the floorboards silent under her tread. Skye was already asleep, her breathing a soft, rhythmic tide that mocked the jagged, desperate rhythm of Darla’s own lungs. Darla slid under the covers, but they felt like a cage rather than comfort. She lay on her back, rigid, staring up at the ceiling fan as it sliced through the stagnant air in a slow, hypnotic blur.
She felt a sickening wave of guilt. Skye was her sanctuary,the only place in the world that should have been safe, yet Darla couldn’t unclench a single muscle. She was terrified of the dark, and even more terrified of closing her eyes. If she drifted off, she knew the night terrors would be waiting, ready to haul her back to the Dogwood, and to Him.
“I’m such a mess…” she lamented as her eyes watched the fan spin, a blade of shadow against the ceiling, and found herself desperately wishing it would simply pick her up and swallow her whole, erasing her from the room entirely so she wouldn’t have to exist in a body that still sometimes barely felt like her own. Sleep came eventually, but without a second of rest within.
Eight hours later, the dark, suffocating terror of the spare bedroom had been replaced by the blinding, fluorescent reality of the First Coast Credit Union’s downtown IT department. It was mid-July in the River City, a humid, sweltering ninety-five degrees outside, but inside Cubicle 4B, it was a sterile, aggressive sixty-two degrees. Darla May LeMonte sat huddled in her ergonomic mesh chair, actively trying to compress her physical geometry into the smallest possible space.
She was swaddled in her armor. Her soft, oversized black cardigan was pulled tight and buttoned all the way up to her collarbone, complete with her trans pride SHE / HER button nice and visible for all to see. Though she kept her sleeves stretched down to cover her knuckles. Beneath the desk, hidden from the view of the middle-management banking executives, her feet were tucked tightly together, clad in thick, striped pink-and-white programming socks. She was a high-femme ghost haunting a spreadsheet factory, shivering and desperate to remain unseen.
On her primary monitor, a wireframe for the credit union’s new mobile app interface waited for her input.
The cursor blinked mockingly.
Blink. Blink. Blink.
Darla stared at the screen, but the lines of code were swimming. The sheer, bone-deep exhaustion from the 3:00 AM night terror was catching up to her, eroding the fragile walls she had built to keep the past quarantined. Her brain was dropping packets, lagging behind the reality of the office.
Above her, the massive industrial HVAC system kicked on with a low, vibrating hum.
Darla’s hands paused over her mechanical keyboard. The hum wasn’t a steady, mechanical drone. Through the fog of her exhaustion, her traumatized brain began to instantly pattern-match the sound, twisting the frequency until it found a rhythm.
Thump. Thump. Hum.
One. Two. Three. One. Two. Three.
It was a 3/4 time signature. It was the tinny, recorded strings of a classical waltz playing from concealed speakers.
Darla’s breath hitched. She tried to type a line of CSS, but her fingers were trembling so badly she kept hitting the wrong keys.
A vent directly above her cubicle blew a steady stream of icy, recycled air down the back of her neck. But as the phantom waltz music swelled in her ears, the physical sensation of the air conditioning began to warp. The synthetic chill thickened. It stopped feeling like cold Freon and started to feel impossibly heavy, coarse, and abrasive against her skin.
She let out a soft, panicked whimper. It was the blazer.
Right there, sitting in a modern office in 2026, the phantom weight of a 100% wool navy blazer dropped squarely onto her shoulders. She could feel the stiff, starchy collar biting into her neck. She could feel the boxy, rigidly tailored chest piece pressing inward, an invisible, crushing force trying to forcefully flatten her breasts and broaden her frame. The ghost of Mr. LeMonte was trying to stitch itself over her soft, cotton-clad body.
Stand up straight, LeMonte! the hum of the server room seemed to hiss. Command the room! It bellowed.
Darla violently shook her head, dragging her acrylic nails down the soft cotton of her cardigan, desperate to feel the truth of her own clothes. She couldn’t do this. She couldn’t debug a user interface while her own internal software was catastrophically crashing.
Needing a desperate, immediate anchor to the present, she abandoned her code. She slammed her mouse to the top of her second monitor, opened a new browser tab, and typed in Facebook. She needed the algorithm. She needed the mindless, numbing scroll of cat videos, local news, and distant acquaintances to flood her brain with cheap dopamine and drown out the waltz.
The blue and white feed loaded, sterile and safe. Darla exhaled a shaky breath, her right hand furiously spinning the scroll wheel. Ad for car insurance. Baby pictures from a girl she barely knew in college. A meme about coffee.
Then, the scroll abruptly stopped
Staring back at her from the center of the monitor was a photo of a perfectly manicured, emerald-green lawn in East Cobb, anchored by a massive, opulent brick colonial home. The profile picture attached to the post was a woman with rigid posture, a tight, practiced smile, and eyes that demanded absolute perfection. Hazel LeMonte, her mother. The caption read:
Such a blessed afternoon hosting the East Marietta Garden Club. So incredibly proud of my handsome son Derrek and his beautiful family for stopping by. #FamilyFirst #LeMonteLegacy #MakeAmericaPoliteAgain
Attached was a photo of her older brother Derrek, the Golden Child, the undisputed, perfect heir to the Trust, standing tall and masculine, wrapping a protective arm around his pristine wife Catherine.Though Darla could only focus on their smiles – pristine, clean, perfectly polished veneers. Beneath it she knew they all had little fangs that could barely chew on anything. But the only thing people saw was the shine, fake and perfect.
Darla’s lip curled, her upper teeth baring in a visceral, animalistic sneer of pure disgust. Family First, Darla thought, the irony tasting like battery acid in her mouth. Her mother’s definition of family was a hostage situation. It was a gated community built on the crushed, suffocated bones of anyone who didn’t fit the blueprint. Hazel would rather post a hundred photos of her perfect, compliant son than ever acknowledge her trans daughter who had finally found herself.
The phantom weight of the wool blazer flared hot with a sudden spike of anger. Darla didn’t linger. She didn’t click the photo to see who had commented, no matter how much she wanted to see those 11 comments. Lies. Everything she touches is full of lies. With a sharp, aggressive flick of her index finger, she violently spun the scroll wheel, eagerly and desperately burying her mother’s pristine, toxic lie beneath a flurry of new posts, running blindly down the timeline to escape her.
She scrolled faster, her eyes blurring as the text whipped past.
She just wanted to be numb. But the algorithm, algorithmic and cruel, had already realized she was interacting with Marietta content. And it was teeing up the next post. It populated her feed as a “Suggested Event,” a digital ghost summoned from the server farms, fueled by the cookies tracking her geographical dread.
The banner image wasn’t a meme or a targeted clothing ad. It was a high-resolution photograph of a sprawling, T-shaped red brick manor choked in creeping kudzu and Southern arrogance. Superimposed over the image, in that looping, arrogant, gold-leaf cursive she used to see stamped on thick cardstock envelopes, were the words:
The Dogwood Society: 15-Year Class Reunion & Bloom Ball.
The air in Darla’s lungs vanished.
The dissociation didn’t creep in this time; it hit her like a derailed freight train. The sterile, gray fabric walls of Cubicle 4B violently warped. The cheap particleboard seemed to bleed, darkening, hardening, physically transforming before her eyes into oppressive, polished mahogany panels. The glaring fluorescent lights above her dimmed, replacing the office’s surgical brightness with the heavy, moody shadows of a 1990s ballroom.
Then, the coup began.
It started at the base of her spine. A sudden, terrifying rigidity seized her vertebrae, violently locking them into a perfectly straight, militaristic column. Her shoulders wrenched backward against her will, popping with the strain. It wasn’t just muscle memory.
It was him.
We are cordially invited, the voice whispered inside her head.
It wasn’t an echo of Mr. Abernathy or her wicked mother. It was a voice she hadn’t spoken with in years. It was her own vocal cords, pitched down, thick with artificial bass, stoicism, and starchy entitlement. It was Patrick. It was Mr. LeMonte.
Darla’s hands slammed onto her desk, her acrylic nails clicking frantically against the laminate as she tried to physically push herself away from the monitor. “No!”, Darla screamed, a desperate, growing panic. “You’re dead! I burned you! You are ashes in the St. Johns River!”
A gentleman always RSVPs, the ghost replied, cold and parasitic. Are we not a gentleman?
She could feel him crawling behind her eyes, a separate, distinct entity that had died but utterly refused to leave the haunting. Patrick was reaching for the steering wheel. He was looking through her eyes. He was trying to command her right hand to take the mouse, to cross the digital floor, and click Going.
The phantom wool blazer crushed her chest, a suffocating compression flattening her breasts and locking her elbows into severe, angular positions. She could smell the peppermint gum and stale tobacco of the tailor. She could feel the agonizing pinch of the hard-soled oxfords on her feet instead of her soft programming socks.
“Leave me alone!” Darla wept as she screeched, fighting a brutal, losing battle for control of her own hands. “I am not you! Why are you still haunting me?!”
Shoulders back, Mr. LeMonte, the entity commanded, entirely ignoring her tears. Occupy the space, stop being such a girl about it.
The world around her began to rapidly desaturate. The colorful wireframes on her UX monitors faded to a dull, buzzing static. Her peripheral vision tunneled, the edges of the credit union office bleeding into a suffocating gray haze. Her breathing grew incredibly shallow, sharp little gasps that failed to pull any actual oxygen past the phantom Windsor knot choking her throat.
She was trapped in the dark again. The boy in the suit was sitting up in his grave, demanding his life back.
Darla’s voice tore through the cubicle farm, a raw, jagged sound that didn’t feel like hers, but was the only thing she had left to fight with. “THIS IS MY LIFE! THIS IS MY BODY! YOU CAN’T HAVE IT!”she screamed at the shocked and sterile air of the office. “STAY DEAD! JUST STAY DEAD!” The effort ripped through her, a white-hot agony radiating from her chest, and she let out a final, feral, guttural scream, the sound of a woman tearing herself apart to keep her own soul, before the world collapsed.
But in a sudden gasp the gray static swallowed the monitors.
It swallowed the mahogany walls.
And then, as Mr. LeMonte’s hand reached for the mouse, the world went entirely black.
.
..
…
“Darla? Honey?” The harsh, humming buzz of the fluorescent vanity lights snapped Darla back into her body like a rubber band. Suddenly she found herself in the women’s restroom.
Darla flinched violently, her spine locking but head looking around to take in stock of her surroundings. She was alone save for one other person, Sarah, a senior QA tester from two rows over, was hovering near the paper towel dispenser. Sarah’s hands were fluttering uselessly in the air, her face a portrait of deep, uncomfortable terror. The bathroom door was propped open, and Darla could hear the hushed, scandalous murmurs of the IT department floating down the hallway.
Darla was gripping the edges of the cold porcelain sink in the women’s restroom with her right hand. Her left hand was hovering over the basin, trembling violently. The gray haze of the dissociation was rapidly retreating, and as the numbing fog lifted, the physical pain rushed in to fill the void. A sharp, throbbing agony radiated from her knuckles. She looked down.
Two of her pink, manicured acrylic nails were completely snapped off at the quick, and a steady stream of blood was running down her fingers, swirling into the drain with the cold tap water. She stared at the blood, her chest heaving as the horrifying, fragmented reality of what had just happened began to stitch itself together in her mind.
The terrified prey animal inside Darla’s chest seized the controls. The emergency fawning subroutine engaged instantly, desperate to put the mask back on, to shove the messy, unhinged reality back into the neat, polite box society demanded of her
“I’m so sorry,” Darla gasped, pitching her voice up into a breathless, artificially sweet register. She grabbed a paper towel with her good hand and frantically wrapped it around her bleeding knuckles, forcing her lips to curve upward into a bright, agonizing Customer Service smile. “I am so, so sorry. Gosh, how embarrassing.”
“Are you okay? You were… you were screaming at yourself,” Sarah said gently, taking a tentative step backward, clearly frightened. “Darla, you punched right through your screen. Do you need me to call an ambulance?”
“No! No, I’m completely fine,” Darla chirped, her voice trembling so badly it sounded like a skipping record. “Just… a terrible reaction to some bad sushi I had for lunch. Or a migraine! A hemiplegic migraine, I think. It just made me completely lose my head and spasm for a second. The screen was just too bright. I’m so sorry if I startled anyone, I feel just awful.”
She was babbling, burying the trauma beneath a mountain of polite, agreeable apologies. She wanted to say her mantra, she wanted to say I am Darla, I am a woman, I am thirty four years old, I am safe – but right now she knew none of those things with the mask sealed this tight. She smoothed her damp hair down, desperately trying to make herself look like the quiet, unassuming coder girl girl she was supposed to be.
But it was absurd. She was standing in a corporate restroom, bleeding through a paper towel, smiling like a beauty queen while the ghost of a dead boy rattled the bars of her ribcage. The camouflage had completely failed.
As she stepped out of the restroom, Diane was waiting for her in the hallway.
Her boss was a no-nonsense, fiercely perceptive woman who managed the IT department with an iron fist and zero tolerance for corporate bullshit. Diane stood with her arms crossed over her tailored blouse, her expression unreadable as she blocked Darla’s path back to the cubicles.
“Diane, I am so incredibly sorry for the disruption,” Darla started immediately, bowing her head slightly, her bloody hand clasped tightly behind her back. “I just had a sudden medical—”
“Stop,” Diane said. The command wasn’t loud, but it was absolute. Diane didn’t look angry; she looked deeply troubled. She gestured toward the glass door of her private office. “In here. Now.”
Darla followed, her heavy, sensible office shoes dragging on the industrial carpet. When the glass door clicked shut, severing the stares of the entire floor, Darla shrank into one of the guest chairs. She pulled her cardigan tighter around her shoulders, waiting for the reprimand. Waiting for the correction.
Diane didn’t sit behind her desk. She leaned against the edge of it, looking down at Darla’s trembling frame, the smudged mascara, and the makeshift, blood-soaked bandage on her hand.
“I don’t know what kind of ghosts you’re fighting at your desk, Darla,” Diane said, her voice dropping the corporate formality entirely. “But you can’t fight them here. You shattered a six-hundred-dollar monitor with your bare hand and screamed at it to stay dead.”
“I can pay for it,” Darla whispered, the bright, fake smile finally faltering, her lower lip trembling uncontrollably. “You can dock my pay. I can go back to work. I can finish the wireframes by three on my backup screen, I promise—”
“You are going on leave,” Diane interrupted, her voice firm, leaving absolutely no room for negotiation. She reached over and handed Darla a fresh box of tissues. “Mental health leave. Effective immediately. You are not coming back tomorrow, and you are not logging on next week. You look completely burned up, Darla, and I am not going to sit here and watch you set yourself on fire in my department.”
Darla took a tissue with her good hand, her acrylic nails digging into her own palm. The polite deflection wasn’t working. The armor of her manners had completely rusted through. Mr. LeMonte wasn’t just a nightmare anymore; he was actively sabotaging her waking life, threatening her job, her stability, and her safety.
She looked up at Diane, dropping the customer service pitch entirely. Her voice came out raw, exhausted, and terrifyingly honest.
“I’m more burned than I let on, Diane,” Darla confessed, the truth tasting like ash in her mouth.
Diane held her gaze for a long moment, then nodded slowly, a profound sympathy softening her sharp features.
“Take the time you need. Go out the back stairwell so you don’t have to walk past the floor. I’ll have Sarah pack up your bag and bring it down to your car.”
Darla stood up, her legs feeling like lead. She had spent decades building a cage of ‘Yes, ma’am’ and ‘No, sir’ to protect herself, but the ghost had just effortlessly ripped the bars apart from the inside.
As she walked toward the back exit, clutching her bleeding hand, shame settled heavily into her bones. The back stairwell was a concrete chute of echoes and shadows, a purgatory between the life she had tried to build and the ruin she had left behind. When Darla pushed open the heavy steel door, the Florida afternoon hit her like a physical blow. The air was thick, heavy, and tasted of exhaust and humidity; a suffocating, swampy blanket that was a million miles away from the climate-controlled sterility of the office she had just been ejected from.
She walked toward her car, her pace uneven, her head throbbing in time with the steady, dull ache of her bandaged hand. The parking lot was a shimmering heat mirage, the asphalt radiating a blinding, aggressive glare. She fumbled with her keys, her fingers clumsy and raw, and scrambled into the driver’s seat of her old and busted Toyota Corolla she lovingly named ‘The Roach’.
As soon as she slammed the door, the heat inside the car felt like a furnace, but it was a real heat. It was biological. It was messy. It was the heat of a living, breathing woman, not the synthetic, predatory chill of the Dogwood Society. She exhaled a shuddering breath and leaned her forehead against the steering wheel.
Her hand was shaking so badly she almost dropped her phone twice before she could hit the call button.
“Darla?” Skye’s voice came through on the first ring, instant and sharp with concern. “I saw your text about the meeting. Are you okay? Did you get fired?”
Darla opened her mouth to start the usual dance. I’m fine, just a little medical thing, everything is handled. But the words died in her throat. She looked down at the blood seeping through the corner of her paper towel bandage, a dark, star-shaped stain on the steering wheel cover. The mask was shattered, and the effort to keep picking up the pieces was suddenly, impossibly, more than she could bear.
“I didn’t get fired,” Darla said, her voice cracking, stripped of all its high-femme politeness. She sounded like she was submerged in water. “They put me on leave. Diane… Diane watched me lose it. She watched me break the monitor. Skye, I think I’m losing it. I think he’s back.”
There was a moment of heavy, electric silence on the other end. Darla could imagine Skye in their kitchen, putting down whatever she was holding, her posture hardening into that protective, fierce intensity that was the only thing standing between Darla and the dark.
“Tell me,” Skye said, her voice dropping into that low, steady anchor-line she used whenever the world felt like it was ending. “Tell me exactly what happened.”
Darla told her. She told her about the Facebook invitation. She told her about the mahogany walls bleeding through the cubicle, about the blazer, the smell of the mothballs, and the voice in her head that sounded like a coffin lid slamming shut. She told her about the scream, and the blood on her hand, and the terrifying, cold certainty that Mr. LeMonte wasn’t a memory anymore.
“It’s like he’s dead but these echoes are trying to bring him back to life,” Darla whispered, tears finally tracking hot, clean lines through her smudged mascara. “Every time I get close to the Dogwood name, he’s stronger. If I don’t stop him, he’s going to take the body back. He’s going to make me wear that suit again.”
She looked up at the dashboard. Tucked near the center console were her faded, peeling trans-pride bumper stickers, her quiet, daily protest, her claim to her own skin. They looked so small, so fragile, in the face of the massive, looming rot of her history.
As long as that building stood, as long as the Dogwood Society existed, the ghost would have a beacon. The society was the foundation of the house he lived in inside her brain. If she wanted to be free, she didn’t just need to change her life. She needed to unmake the past.
She gripped the steering wheel, her knuckles white, her jaw set with a sudden, feral clarity.
“I have to do something about this, Skye,” Darla said, her voice dropping into a register she had never used before, quiet, cold, and final. “It’s getting worse. And I’m tired of being afraid.”
“What are you thinking?” Skye asked, and in her voice, Darla didn’t hear judgment. She heard a match striking against a box.
Darla looked out at the shimmering, heat-distorted horizon of Jacksonville, and for the first time, she saw a path forward that didn’t involve shrinking. It didn’t involve fawning. It involved fire.
“I’m coming home,” Darla said. “And then, I think we need to take a road trip to Marietta.”
She knew then that she was going to have to kill him all over again.
-END OF PROLOGUE-
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