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better for her than he was. Safer.
    There were things to be done and his purpose was clear. He couldn’t afford this distraction; the price would be more than he could bear, and it wouldn’t be his alone.
    For her sake, he needed to end this dalliance quickly. If she hated him, all the better.
    But still he watched her. The heart that he wasn’t supposed to have blossomed in his chest, reaching for her even though the rest of him knew it could never be. Would never be.
    His carefully planned strategy had changed because of her. He would spend his last breath making sure he never tainted the one true thing he’d ever really known.
     
    The usual silence of dinner with Father had given me the opportunity to push my food around my plate listlessly and relive the moment when the new boy, whose name turned out to be Haden Black, touched me without touching me. No matter how hard I tried to put it out of my mind, the feel of his breath against my ear as he whispered to another girl kept me riveted to the same memory, over and over. The way he looked at me while he did it … I could have sworn he knew what he did to me.
    Even as he frightened me, he intrigued me.
    Thankfully, he had been easily avoided for the rest of the day. We had only one class together and our desks were on opposite sides of the room. Not that I hadn’t been hyperaware of him, but at least I couldn’t see him.
    Father took a business call at the table. He rarely did that. Sometimes when I watched him talk to strangers, I noticed he didn’t look so much like my father. With me, he carried himself so severely, so guarded.
    When he spoke on the phone, even though he was businesslike, he relaxed. His features softened. His brown eyes warmed. My father had impeccable taste in clothes, his hair, though thinning, still had a bit of wave and only a little gray, and I always thought his hands were almost elegant the way he used them in conversation. But it was only when he wasn’t talking to me that I thought he might actually be a handsome man.
    “Please pass the carrots,” I said when he finished his call.
    Father shot me a perplexed glance as he handed me the bowl. For all our estrangement, he knew my eating habits, and carrots were never my favorite. Mostly I just wanted a reason to interact with him.
    “Thank you.”
    “Hmmm,” he answered.
    Perhaps it was the lack of sound sleep that clouded my judgment, but a small ball of anger fizzed in my chest at the way he treated me, and I wanted to provoke him into something—anything—besides this stoic cordial acquaintance association we had. So I asked, “Did my mother like carrots?”
    He reacted, like I’d known he would, as if I had slapped his face. Shock paled his skin, and then red replaced it. “What does it matter what kind of food your mother preferred?” He punctuated each word with a punch of mettle. Father didn’t appreciate things that came out of nowhere.
    “I just … I just want to know her better.”
    He’d recovered himself and masked his face in cool indifference once again. “I loved your mother, Theia. It pains me to talk about her. She did not like carrots, as I recall.” Father wiped the corners of his mouth, though it wasn’t necessary, as he ate with a precision that a surgeon would envy. “Your mother didn’t like much that wasn’t junk food.”
    I’d gotten that from her, my love of junk food. That made me smile.
    Father pushed away from the table. “Perhaps if she’d learned to take better care of herself, you could be asking her these questions.”
    My smile was quickly replaced with a tug of longing at my heart. He’d known that would hurt. I deserved it, I suppose, for bringing her up. My mother was a forbidden subject unless to provide my father a cautionary tale in order to bring me to heel.
    He blamed her for dying. I suspect he blamed me for killing her.
    He left me sitting alone at the table, though I was no lonelier than I had been when he was still in