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By Root 5115 0

never paid much attention to the fact that I occasionally would talk to invisible people. It’s not that unusual for kids to have imaginary friends, so I guess they ignored it. Plus, with all the arguing and problems in our house, it wasn’t like they heard a lot of what I was saying anyway. Well, not until a few years later, that is. In one of his rare sober moments, my father ran across my diary. I’d been writing about seeing these dead women from time to time, and hearing them speak to me. I was trying to understand why it was happening to me—what it meant, you know?—but he saw it as an opportunity to cash in on me.”

“Jesus.” Rio was despising the man more and more.

“Cash in on you how?”

“He could never hold a job for long, and he was always looking for ways to make a fast buck. He thought if he charged people to come and speak with me—people who’d lost loved ones and were hoping to connect with them somehow—he could just sit back and count the cash as it poured in.” She shook her head slowly. “I tried to tell him that’s not how my visions worked. I couldn’t bring them up on command. I never knew when I’d see them, and even when they appeared, it wasn’t like I could carry on a conversation with them. The dead women I see speak to me, tell me things they want me to hear, or want me to act on, but that’s it. There’s no chatting about who’s hanging out with them on the Other Side, or any of the other parlor game type of stuff you see on TV. But my father wouldn’t listen. He demanded I figure out how to use my skill…and so, for a while, I tried to fake it. It didn’t last long. One of the families he tried to swindle pressed charges, and my father split. That was the last we ever saw or heard from him.”

Good riddance, Rio thought savagely, but he could understand how that kind of abandonment must have hurt the child Dylan was.

“What about your brothers?” he asked. “Weren’t they old enough to step in and do something about your father?”

“By that time, both of them were gone.” Dylan’s voice sounded very quiet, more pained than at any time when she’d been reliving her father’s betrayal. “I was only seven when Morrison died in a car accident. He’d just gotten his license that week, just turned sixteen. My father took him out to celebrate. He got Morrie drunk, and evidently my father was in even worse shape, so he gave the keys to Morrie to drive them home. He missed a turn and ran the car into a telephone pole. My father walked away with a concussion and a broken collarbone, but Morrie…he never came out of his coma. He died three days later.”

Rio couldn’t contain the growl that boiled up from his throat. The urge to kill, to avenge and protect this woman in his arms was savage, a seething fire in his veins. “I really need to find this so-called man and give him a taste of true pain,” he muttered. “Tell me your other brother beat your father to within an inch of his useless life.”

“No,” Dylan said. “Lennon was older than Morrie by a year and a half, but where Morrie was loud and outgoing, Len was quiet and reserved. I remember the look on his face when Mom came home and told us Morrie had died and our father would be spending a couple days in jail once he got out of the hospital. Len just…dissolved. I saw something in him die that day too. He walked out of the house and straight into a military recruiter’s office. He couldn’t wait to get away…from us, from all of it. He never looked back. Some friends of his said he’d been shipped out to Beirut, but I don’t know for sure. He never wrote or called. He just…disappeared. I just hope he’s happy, wherever his life took him. He deserves that.”

“You deserve it too, Dylan. Jesus, you and your mother both deserve more than what life has given you so far.”

She lifted her head and pivoted to face him, her eyes glistening and moist. Rio cupped her beautiful face and brought her to him, kissing her with only the lightest brush of his lips across hers. She wrapped her arms around him, and as he held her there, he wondered if maybe there was a way that he could give Dylan some hope…some