"Hello," he would say. "Wanna know how I got these scars?"
He never told them the real story. He told them he'd been slashed by an angry hawk, that he'd tripped on a rake, that his father had done it in a drunken rage.
He never told them how he'd come home late. They'd fought that morning about something-he couldn't remember what-and after his shift ended, he'd bought her a tambourine.
The house was dark-he should've realized that something was wrong. She never went to bed before he came home.
She didn't answer when he called her name, either.
"Kat," he said, and kicked off his boots.
"I'm home. Where are you?" as he flicked on the living room lights and saw what was left of his fiancee.
She was sitting in her favorite chair, a book on her knee. Her beautiful hair clung to the red that smeared her face and neck. Her mouth, the one that he had kissed so many times, had been slashed open at the corners.
The tambourine slid from his fingers and hit the floor with a crash.
"No." He lunged forward and cupped her empty face between his hands. "Wake up, baby. Wake up. This isn't funny. Wake up."
He didn't hear the murderer creep up behind him, but he felt the knife against his throat. He heard a laugh, high pitched and wild, as he tried to fight. He saw stars when a fist crashed into his head.
And when he woke up in the hospital with thirteen stitches in either cheek, he heard them say she was dead.
He never told them how he'd said they were lying. How he didn't go to the funeral because he was convinced that if he just went back to their house, she would be waiting there at the kitchen table with a new song to play for him on her guitar. If he just went home.
He never told them that he spent years searching for the killer. How that search turned him into a killer himself.
He never told them that sometimes he could hear her voice whispering in his ear, telling him that everything was his fault. If he hadn't started the fight, if he hadn't been late, if he hadn't loved her so much.
If he hadn't, then she would still be there.
That's what he thought, every time he looked into the eyes of some poor soul and said those words.
"Hello. Wanna know how I got these scars?"