Chapter 27
HEATH
Monday
Christmas Eve
I learned the lessons of love and hate a long time ago. Twenty years ago, to be exact.
I was eight.
Love was a fairytale, a story more unbelievable than the Boogeyman in those days. There was very little of it in my household, and what little that did exist, only survived in the small bonds between me and my equally unloved siblings, a ragtag group of dreamers, drug addicts and money-chasers.
I didn’t know much about my father’s other children outside of his marriage to my mother. But I’d heard enough rumors over the years to know they existed.
And among them, I was the worst. At least, in the eyes of the only man who mattered.
More than a decade and a half after learning the first lesson of love and hate, I had wound up learning the second as
