Cathryn Grant's Blog

Napa Valley, California

Tess was acting as if Santa Claus was coming to town.

She’d placed a bottle of Black Mask’s flagship wine on the coffee table. Beside it was the largest flower vase I’d ever seen outside a hotel lobby, filled with eighteen white roses.

“Why eighteen?” I asked.

“Because it’s extravagant,” she said.

“So are twelve.”

“Everyone does twelve.”

“He won’t count them.”

“But he’ll know on a subconscious level there are more than twelve.”

“If you say so.”

“I want him to kno...

NOW: Charlotte

When Sara’s house sold, I felt as if I’d finally buried my best friend. At the same time, I felt as if I were helping her live on, giving new life to the home she’d always seen as a creative extension of herself.

Until that moment, the responsibilities I had as both the executor of her trust and her real estate agent had weighed heavily on me.

Not that I viewed carrying out her wishes as a burden, I was honored. My heart had broken into a hundred pieces as I watched her body gr...

Napa Valley, California

Tess was waiting for Damien and me. She stood on the front patio of her palatial Mediterranean home wearing a pale green dress that fell to mid-calf.

As I slid out of the Uber, she took off her sunglasses and stared at me, shaking her head ever so slightly.

I had no doubt the head-shaking was over my new hair color.

The evening before my flight, I’d had my hair dyed a stunning strawberry blonde with streaks of copper. It was longer now, reaching to the center of my ba...

Prologue

I stabbed her with a palette knife.

Repeatedly. Until she was dead.

I know I’m not a killer at heart. But sometimes you do what has to be done to escape the prison you’ve found yourself in. And that was my only way out.

The lies had piled up until I was suffocating. There were so many lies, my whole life was a lie. What were a few more?

The way I look at things, even now, it was her or me.

2003

It proved her arrogance that she felt safe sitting beside a stream she couldn’t hear, reading a novel. Earphones blocked every sound, including my footsteps, as the Walkman pumped music inside her skull. The words in her book filled the rest of her brain with an imagined world so that it might as well have been only her body sitting there alone, silencing all her instincts for self-protection.

I watched her for quite a long time, although maybe it only felt like a long time. Unlike her, I...

I wasn’t in the habit of talking to anyone about anything going on inside my head.

But Damien wasn’t anyone. Talking to him was different because he would never repeat the secrets I told him. Not verbatim, anyway. He would pick up a phrase here and there, he might choose an appealing word and repeat it over and over, telling everyone who came into the apartment what was on my mind, but they wouldn’t understand because he would keep the critical details locked inside his tiny brain.

When I sp...

... if this was the year he’d returned to kill her, also. His error. But every year, the odor faded and she continued breathing.

After an hour, she saw the smoke, yet she smelled nothing. It was thicker this time.

It wasn’t him after all, it was the other, returning from the grave to take her with him.

The manhole cover was misaligned. The stripe marking the side of the road across the metal plate didn’t connect to the painted line on the pavement.

She looked out her window and fumed, infuriated by the carelessness eating at the fabric of society. “I want it fixed,” she whispered.

“Stop obsessing,” he said.

“Why doesn’t anyone care? I’m losing my mind.”

“You are.”

It haunted her at night. It tormented her days. He told her to find something that mattered in the world. Otherwise, she was...

The doors were just closing. He stuck his arm inside to hold them open, joining her in the elevator. Her breath froze for a moment.

No, it would be okay. He was large, but this was a luxury hotel. It was fine. She was safe.

He pressed the button for the eighth floor. She let out her breath. Her floor was the twenty-seventh.

The elevator chimed and the light on number eight went out. The doors opened, but he didn’t leave. Two men waiting stepped inside, nodding to the man beside her.

The ...

With Stephanie gone from my life, I had expected a rush of freedom. Instead, I was now sharing an apartment with her daughter, which was turning out to present its own, slightly different type of claustrophobia.

Knowing someone was interested in when I was coming home made me wonder if I’d made a deal with that mythical horned creature who had loomed in the shadows of my childhood, blamed by my parents for holding too much sway in my heart. I had exchanged my privacy and freedom for a larger, ...