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Chapter Fourteen, Sunshine Don't Feel Right
There was a funeral. A burial, too. A man with secrets and scars was lowered into the ground with a priest's words echoing hollow over the coffin she had built for him in her mind long before his body stopped breathing.
She didn't cry. Not then. Not with her mother at her side, not with the dirt hitting the wood. Not with the dried flowers dropped atop the casket. But the silence that followed after death clung to her. It haunted her. Chased her in her dreams. Even now.
It wasn't the grave that haunted her the most. It was everything that came after.
"Amelia Bloom, age eighteen... possibly."
A light buzz echoed in the room. A flickering ceiling light, the low hum of a heater that barely worked; the red flickering light of a camera pointed straight at her. She remembered the table between them, between those men who sat with her for hours, just after being dragged from that mall fire.
She still remembered how her handwriting looked when she was asked to sign something, and her hand trembled so much that she couldn't do it right.
"You're listed on no official birth record we can locate. You never had a Social Security number until this year. Can you explain that?"
She couldn't—not in that state of mind, and not even if days passed. She had stared at the wall behind them—gray, blank, just like her head. She felt like a feather, zoning in and out of this reality as the recent events flashed in her memory in front of her eyes.
"Your father falsified military clearance forms. There's no trace of a mother on your file until two months ago. Did he ever tell you why?"
Amelia shook her head then. The memory itself made her recoil. She remembered her fingers tightening into fists beneath the table. Her breath caught in her throat every time they mentioned him.
This wasn't fair. "Do you understand how serious this is, Amelia?"
Yes. Too well.
He had a funeral, but things never changed. Her dreams were stitched with the sounds of walkies crackling, of her father's final breath. Of that damn screech from the monster that felt more familiar than anything ever.
Her sheets tangled around her legs every night like tentacles. Her new bedroom was dark, and it felt quieter than what she had grown used to. Sometimes she swore she could still smell the sewerage from that basement, still feel the grime on her hands, the blood pooling around her knees.
She'd scrubbed them raw.
"Did your father ever tell you what he was protecting you from?"
