7
COLORADO, 2013
At sixteen, Clara lay in bed, looking into the dark. She could hear the girls around her, whispering. She would have sighed, but Clara knew she would be heard, so she swallowed it. She hadn’t had a phone call from her mother in over a month, and when she called the house in Palm Springs, Darren and her mother were always out.
She had known what life would be like after her mother’s marriage. Darren was always lurking in her mother’s house, lying in wait for Clara. His constant presence was what had driven her away to boarding school in the first place. Though she had known what life would be like after her mother’s honeymoon, foreknowledge hadn’t made the reality any easier to live with. She resented having to flee her own home. For the last three years, she’d felt like
