Chapter 13

Mason:

Sleep refused to come. The ocean outside whispered against the rocks, steady and endless, but my mind would not quiet. I lay in bed staring at the ceiling fan turning in slow, uneven circles. Every time I closed my eyes I saw her. Lily. A week was all it had been, and already she lived inside me like she had always been there.

It made no sense. Nothing about this made sense.

I tried to push her out of my head and let my thoughts drift somewhere safer, somewhere familiar, and they landed on my father.

The man who shaped me, the man who ruined me. For most of my life he was stone. Cold, unyielding, sharp in every word he spoke. He believed emotions were weakness, that softness broke a man. I grew up under that philosophy, learning to keep my voice steady, my face blank, my desires buried where no one could find them.

I became good at it. Too good.

My earliest memories of him are filled with silence and order. I remember mornings at the dining table where he read the paper while