Page 95 of Prey

If he was home, I wanted to follow him around like a little lost puppy.

So sleeping apart was out of the question, but my parents seemed happy with their arrangement.

I took a deep breath and shut off my car, climbing out of it.

My childhood home looked like the house fromThe Notebookon steroids. It was white, with navy blue shutters and a big wrap-around porch, which had been my favorite thing about this entire house growing up.

It had southern charm, as I’d heard one of my dad’s friends say once.

When I was still living here, my parents hosted parties regularly.

We stopped doing that when I was fourteen, after the incident at the cliff, when they didn’t want anyone to know that their daughter had been abducted by some terrible person and suffered some amnesia afterward.

I looked down at my feet as I walked up to the house.

The loss of memory was what bothered me the most.

I lost hours of my life, which I was sure was crucial to remember.

The doctor who examined me said I wasn’t raped, but sometimes, I wondered if I had been assaulted in other ways.

And when I was finally released from the hospital, my parents brought me home, keeping me secluded.

As if there was something shameful about being abducted when it hadn’t been my fault in the first place.

I didn’t ask to be taken. Didn’t ask to be pushed off a cliff and didn’t ask for injuries that took months to recover from.

I blinked, and suddenly I was standing at the front door.

I looked up at it, taking in the silver door knocker that glinted in the sun. The door had been painted blue recently.

Despite being built in the mid-40s, the house had been kept in good condition.

It had been in my family since my great-grandpa’s time. It was one of the first things he bought when his business started taking off.

He owned a factory that manufactured machinery parts for planes, cars, and tanks.

His business really took off with the war.

I supposed my dad could have kept the family legacy alive. He could have done something with the business that would have brought in more money, but his passion was the law. He left the family business behind, and with no one around to take over, my grandpa had to sell.

I always assumed that since he defied his dad and went his own way in life, he would be more understanding when I wanted to do the same thing.

Neither of my parents thought my job could support me, let alone any future family I might build.

They wanted me back home and apply to law schools.

They wanted me to follow in Dad’s footsteps.

It was one of the main bones of contention between us.

The door clicked open, startling me out of my thoughts, and I looked up at my mother’s gray eyes.

Same eyes as me.

Except hers were now narrowed in a frown as she looked me up and down. “What are you doing, just standing there?”

“Oh. Nothing.”

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