Page 1 of Delilah
Prologue
Sometimes when I think about my father’s suicide, I wonder if he knew he’d kill a part of me, too.
The thing about that mindset is that it’s not fair to him. It took me a long time to realize that his death wasn’t, isn’t, and will never be about me.
Losing my parents shattered me, but I’m still here.
So what does that say about how broken he was?
Chapter 1
At four years old, I was adopted by the richest man in the world.
At four years old, I was twice orphaned.
Seventeen years later, it still doesn’t feel real some days.Sometimes I still wake up hoping it isn’t.
But not once have I ever been so lucky to wake up back in that perfect life I had for so little time.
I remember my time with Christian and Elena so vividly. I remember arriving at a stuffy courtroom in Meridian City in a silver minivan and leaving in a black private jet headed straight for Disney World.
To this day, it’s still one of my favorite memories, because even then, I knew that my new parents would have done absolutely anything to see me smile.
I remember riding the teacups until I got sick. I remember us hunting down every princess in the park so they could sign my autograph book. I remember taking a million pictures in front of Cinderella’s castle and my new parents buying me one of everything from every gift shop in the park.
I remember going to our hotel room that first night and telling Christian Reeves that he was the best daddy in the whole world.
And he was.
I don’t care what anyone says. Christian and Elena Reeves loved me. We were the perfect family. Those four short months I got to spend with them were the best months of my life, and it was the last time I can say I was truly happy.
And then Elliot Young ruined everything.
I know. I know.I knowhe was justified in his concern for his daughter. She was married to a serial killer, after all; but Elliot took away my family. He strangled hiswifeand then shot hisdaughterin the head.
The investigation determined that Elliot knew about the Silencer, and that’s what pushed him off the deep end. My gut has always told me that there’s more to the story—that there’s history there that the rest of the world is never meant to know.
For anger or guilt or simply because Elliot went crazy from his brain tumor, I don’t know, but I was meant to die that day my parents did. I’ve convinced myself over the years that if I had walked into that kitchen a few minutes earlier, Elliot would have shot me too.
Sometimes when I’m in the darkest depths of my depression, I wish that he did. It would have been a mercy.
Looking back on that day feels like an out-of-body experience, but everything about it is burned into my memory so deeply I could probably project it from my eyeballs.
When I first walked into that kitchen to see my father on his knees and blood everywhere, I don’t know why I didn’t scream or cry. I don’t know why I cared so much about those stupid pancakes, but Dad told me he’d get them for me if I counted to one hundred, and I tried so hard to be good and do it.
I got to ten when I heard the gunshot. I was at seventy-two when Paolo found me, still with my back turned from the carnage. I remember him pulling out his phone, calling the police, and telling me to come to him as he held a cupcake to distract me so I wouldn’t turn around.
I turned around anyway, and the first thing I said was, “Mommy?”
She was sitting there, in a pool of her blood with her eyes still open and her face still wet with tears. Dad was there…clutching onto her lifeless body with his own as if trying to drag her to the afterlife with him.
I dropped my cupcake. It landed with a ‘plop’ in a puddle of my father’s blood.
To this day, I can’t even look at a cupcake without bursting into tears.
And if I see a pancake? Well, who knew something so innocent and sweet could be the source of a full-blown panic attack?
Grandma was in the kitchen because of me, because Mom promised me pancakes for breakfast. They were all in the kitchen because of me.
