A/N: This chapter might feel a little slow. It's more about explanation, backstory, and thoughts than it is about action. It will pick up a lot in the next chapter.

Nora Anne Montgomery

February 11, 1897 - October 4, 1926

Beloved wife and mother. At rest.

I trace the lettering with my finger, feeling where moss has filled parts of the inscription. Almost seven decades of weather has begun to wear it down, making it harder to read. Another seven and it will probably be little more than blank stone with the slight ghosts of unreadable words visible, if you squint. Mother. But she isn't, not anymore. I know how much she wants to be. At rest. That part's a lie, too.

"I'm so sorry, Nora..." I whisper. It's early, cold, and the drugs this morning have dulled my emotions to the point where I know they're there but I can't quite feel them. Something between my chest and my brain isn't connecting. But that's for the best.

I lay the white rose at the foot of her grave. It isn't the first time I've brought her flowers. "I couldn't tell you... you would have tried to stop me..."

I kiss the stone gently and get up, making my way across the cemetery to a different grave, one with the dirt still packed fresh around it.

I stand. His headstone is so shiny compared to Nora's, the inscription so legible and new.

Beauregard Hugo Langdon

April 12, 1975 - March 13, 1994

Suffer, little children, to come unto me

Even through the druggy haze I feel rage grip me, swift and sudden, tightening my hands into fists. Suffer. He only suffered because they made him. They chose that for him. It wasn't his fucking destiny.

"Beau..." I say through clenched teeth, my voice shaking with what I know must be fury, "Beau, you didn't deserve this. Any of this...

..your heart was good!" I scream, kicking a nearby tree as hard as I can. I turn, panting, my knuckles white. "You should have been beautiful... you should have had a life... a real life! Not locked away in the attic like a shameful secret, in chains! Not smothered to death by that...

...that cocksucker!" I'm punching the tree now, my fists bloody. "God fucking damn him! And nobody believes me that he fucking did it!"

I turn away again, spent, and sink down to my knees in front of the stone. I run a gentle hand over the top of it, the white rage inside of me giving way to what has to be grief. I'm sure of it. A week and a half ago I attended my own brother's funeral. I didn't cry. I haven't cried. Maybe because I'm a monster. Maybe because I wouldn't dare give Larry the satisfaction of seeing that. Maybe just because I'm angry, so fucking angry that it blots out any sadness I might feel, deadening it like heavy ink on fragile paper.

"You died... loved, Beauregard," I whisper, my voice breaking even though my eyes are dry. "In spite of all this shit, you've gotta know that..." My voice isn't my own. It is high, keening, a child's.

I wipe my nose with the back of my hand. I'm not sure if the blood I see is from there or from where I punched the tree. I stand up.

"But you know what, Beau? I'm gonna make things right for you. I'm gonna make that fucker pay for what he did to you." I give a small laugh that's more bitter than anything. The closest thing to delight that I've felt in a long time creeps up in me as the idea takes hold. "Cause I have some time before school this morning, and I know where I can get a tank of gasoline..."

I take one last glance at Beau's grave as I'm walking away. He isn't a ghost in the house like Nora is. I don't know why. Addie pretends to see him, but I know she's just sad. If he were there, he'd appear to me, right? Besides, I want him to be somewhere different, somewhere restful and lovely.

I smile. "He's gonna know exactly what if felt like to be you..."

Last summer a barn swallow built its nest in the awning above my family's porch. First I saw speckled eggs, then one day there were tiny mouths. Soon the baby birds were awkward and fuzzy, swooping up and down out of the nest in attempts to fly. I stood outside early one morning and watched them. I wanted so much good for them that they made my heart hurt.

Nora appeared beside me unexpectedly, her hand stroking the back portion of my hair. "My Tate has a kind, tender heart," she said gently.

I wiped my eyes. No one had ever called me "My Tate" before. My mother, in her good moods, had drawled "my beautiful son, my perfect son", but there was nothing metaphorical or unconditional about it. It was spoken with rough desperation, and the barely concealed threat of harm if I didn't stay that way.

It wasn't true, though, what Nora said. The flip side to those moments of nearly unbearable tenderness were moments where rage made my vision go white. The voice that came out of me then wasn't mine; it was lower, more primal, pulled mucky from somewhere deep and dark. I couldn't recognize it or control it. I could hit. I could swear and break things and threaten and scream like I'd never heard anyone do. I'd go on like that until the white cleared and I saw again. It wasn't always towards the people who deserved it.

That was the worst thing. I spent so many dim evenings with Nora on the couch in the sitting room, my face nestled in her shoulder, sniffling as I agonized over being capable of such cruelty and then of such frailty and empathy. The combination and the ensuing guilt was all too painful. I hated it, I told her, my big stupid tears dripping all over the fronts of her beautiful dresses. I wished that I could just be one or the other.

She stroked my hair. She didn't say much then; she just listened.

Things like that were what made it so hard for me when she started to go away sometimes. I didn't know where she went to in her mind, just that she'd be wild eyed and babbling about babies, incapable of a coherent sentence and unconscious of her surroundings. She cried. The first time that she didn't recognize me, I ran upstairs and sobbed in the shower, punching the sliding door until it cracked. The one stability and comfort in my life had been pulled out from under me. I felt like I was falling.

I was angry at Nora for slipping away when I still needed her and even angrier at myself for not having the strength to support her when she was weak. Not when that was all she'd ever done for me. The episodes weren't frequent, but they grew, a slow and steady climb upward, in their frequency. That terrified me so much I could hardly admit it. I knew from the first time that I would do anything in my power to bring her back to me, to make her happy again. Anything at all.