Chapter 22.

For a long moment we just stand in our kitchen staring at each other. I know he's doing the same thing as I am. He's looking me over, trying to fit all of the fragments of the girl he knew with the lost woman standing in front of him now.

It hurts me to know what he's seeing.

"You should have called me." He whispers softly, eyes drifting over my tiny frame. My cheek bones jutting out at sharp edges, my eyes swollen and red from days of crying. All of the hurt I've tried so hard to hide from him, to keep tucked away as another of my secrets, is now so plain to see.

I tried to protect him from this.

From me.

"You wouldn't have answered." I reply coldly. But I know it's not really him I'm mad at.

"Missy, what happened?" His lips part and his eyes fill with tears of pity for the sister he'd left behind.

"Which part?" I laugh without any humor in it. "Why are you here?"

His eyes stay locked on mine with ferocity. "When I couldn't get in touch with you I got worried." He says. "You were still in Vancouver the last time we talked and I called all around trying to find you. I finally talked to the owner of the motel you were staying at and he said you'd paid your last week and left."

"They tracked me down about Aunt Ruth." I don't miss the way his eyes darken at the mention of her. I know the line of thought his brain runs down when he thinks of her, same as me. We both hate that woman, not for not wanting us, but for not hating her husband. The unspoken name between us.

"I figured that out." He nods, lifting his hand to remove his hat and set it on the counter before shaking out his unruly brown curls. "And so I called around town but you weren't staying there. So then when I still couldn't get in touch with you, I got even more worried...thinking of you here...In this place?" He shakes his head as if he still can't make his brain understand finding me here. "That's when I started hearing the news...Missy..."

"So you know then?" I ask, lifting my chin trying to put on a front of confidence that doesn't run even close to skin deep.

"It's so fucked up." He says on an exhale. "You realize it's exactly the same, right? Same places and everything?"

"Yeah, I tried to talk to the police about it, but they shut me out." I nod. "Somehow they think I had something to do with it, or they did, I don't know what they're thinking now."

"You can't stay here, Miss." he reaches out to take my hand and he flinches slightly, feeling how boney and frail it is. "What...what happened to you?"

For too long I've tried to hide everything away, keep it cleaned up and tucked aside, trying to protect his feelings but it's been too long.

I walk into his arms and he holds me while I recount it all. The doctors, the pills, Luke, the homelessness, the addiction eating away at my humanity, the things I'd done to secure my next fix, the stealing, the body...everything. Everything that has happened since the moment he walked out of my life up to the moment he casually walked back into it.

By the time I'm done, we are both in tears.

"I'm so...Missy, sorry doesn't even cover it." He holds me tighter. "I was selfish. I was only thinking of me and what I needed to deal with everything and I was young and thought I was doing the right thing but, God, I'd been so wrong. I wanted to come back so many times but I thought you were ok...it's not an excuse. I should have been there to protect you and I wasn't. I just left."

The words wash over me like a hot shower could never do, sinking right into my very marrow. All this time, all I've wanted from Dallas is to hear he regrets leaving me. That's selfish even in its self, but it's true. I'd held back so long but a dark part of me is glad that my suffering has hurt him too.

That's what family is supposed to do. Be there for each other. Feel each other's pain and try to help mend each other. He was supposed to be with me. We should have left here together and so much other stuff may have never even happened.

When we were kids and I fell down, he was there to pick me up. When we were older and he got into trouble, I was there to help get him out.

We were the only two people left in this world who could feel each other's shared heartbreaks and he'd gone away instead.

"I don't want to blame you," I tell him honestly. "But I'd be lying to you if I said I don't resent that you left me."

He looks down at me, his eyes the only thing that remain the same. "I understand," he tells me, rubbing one of my shoulders. "I was wrong, Missy. So wrong."

I don't know what else to say.

So many years of pent up conversations I've imagined playing out between the two of us if I ever saw him like this again, and now when he's standing right here in the flesh, my words run out.

His eyes drift slowly from my face to the house behind me.

He takes one step further into the kitchen but then he stills.

"I don't know how you can be here." He whispers, like his voice might wake the sleeping ghosts. He backs up again until his back bumps against the door. "I never wanted to see this place again."

I look down at his shaking hands and I know exactly how he feels. It's comforting, surprisingly, to see someone else have the same reactions to this place as me.

"I think I needed to come back." I say, looking over my shoulder into the living room. "I think I've been so lost that the only way I thought I could find myself again is if I went back." I laugh a little. "You know like when you tell someone you lost something and they always ask, well, where was the last place you saw it?" I turn and walk across the kitchen, letting my hand rest on the archway into the living room. "It's the only home I've ever had."

"You can't call what we had here a home." He says lowly, eyes trained on the floor in front of his boots. "I can't even look at this place without seeing him, you know? Thinking about all the good times...it just makes it that much harder to get why he did it. I still don't understand how he could..." he trails off, biting his bottom lip. "And now..."

"Now it's like an awful rerun you can't shut off." I sigh. "I can't figure out why someone would be recreating it all? Like this is some twisted slasher movie with a thousand bad remakes."

"It's more than that." He says, looking over at me. "This is personal, Missy. It feels entirely too personal to just be someone getting off their sick kicks being just like Dad. You being here isn't good."

"I know." I sigh but he looks unconvinced. I know him to well to not see the doubt in his eyes. "I know, I do." I nod again. "But I feel like...look, I feel like I can't just leave now. Like you said, this is personal, and I'm so tired of just letting things go and moving along."

I'd never said anything about what Luke had done to me. I slept in that bed and then snuck out, stealing some of the money out of his safe to get me to the next place and I never looked back. But just taking some money after what he did? That wasn't payback or retribution for how he hurt me. And all this time I've held back how angry at everyone else I am, just letting the hiding suffocate me and leave me useless and broken.

None of it had done anyone any good. Not them, not the world, and certainly not me.

"I am tired of being fucked with." I stand taller. "I want this all to stop."

"So what are you gonna do then, Missy? Track down a psycho by yourself? The police can't even do anything and you think that you can?"

Gillians words come back to haunt me. So similar to what my brother had just said.

"No." I raise my arms palms up and let them drop to my sides again. "I don't know."

"You can't just take this all onto your own shoulders." He takes a half step forward then looks around and backs away again. "It's bigger than you."

"No one asked you to come save me, Dallas." I point out. "You can leave whenever you want to."

"I'm not leaving you here."

"Why not?" I snap. "You've done it before. I'm sure you could manage it again." My words come out with much more venom than I'd anticipated. "I'm sorry, I'm just...I'm agitated. I'm pissed off. I'm not trying to take it out on you, you're just here."

As I say it, I know it's true. My body is buzzing uncomfortably and my temples are aching.

"But you can't-."

"Stop telling me what I can and can't do!" I snap again, bringing a quivering hand to my clammy forehead.

"Miss, just-."

We both turn at the small knock at the front door.

Dallas's eyes shift slowly back to me and he holds a finger to his lips. We both stand there, still as statutes, until the knock comes again. A little louder this time.

"Don't leave." I whisper to him as I pad out of the room and down the hall to the front door.

I curl up onto my toes and look out of the peep hole and all thoughts of my brother standing in the other room slide away.

I open the door and step out onto the porch, the cold air instantly going straight through my thin clothes.

"Did you get my message?" Aries asks, shuffling his feet a little.

"I did." I nod. "I didn't need that to know you didn't do anything."

At my words Aries steps in so quickly I don't have time to process what's happening before he's wrapped his arms around me and his face falls into the curve of my neck and he lets out a small sound that breaks what little heart I have left.

"No one..." he takes a faltered breath. "No one here believes me, Missy. My house..."

I tentatively bring my arms up to hold him too, rubbing a small circle into his back. "What about your house?"

"Someone trashed the yard." His weight falls more onto me. "And they painted all over the front in spray paint things like I'm...I'm a freak and a kid killer."

Hate boils deep in my core.

What ever happened to innocent until proven guilty? What happened to people having a shred of humanity left?

"I'm so sorry." I hold him, breathing him in. He pulls back and looks down at me, his face still swollen in places and bruised in others. His lip is cracked and dry. He's a shell of the boy I once knew. "I'm sorry." I don't know what else I am supposed to say. I don't know how to give comfort when I don't even know how to get it myself.

But for once, my weak apologies, seem right. Dallas is right. This whole thing is personal, and it's dragging Aries down with it.

"Can I come in?" He asks quietly and I shift my gaze over my shoulder.

"I have to...I have to tell you something."

"Ok." His brows furrow and he winces a little at the pain the small movement creates.

"Dallas is here."

"Here?" He asks, sounding every bit as skeptical as he should.

I take Aries by the hand and bring him inside. He stops behind me in the living room, looking through to the kitchen where Dallas still holds post at the back door.

"Dude, I thought you were dead." He says across the room and Dallas sighs, lifting s shoulder.

"That was the idea."

An awkward silence crosses over us, making us each feel uncomfortable where we stand.

"Why don't you-." I start to say, not sure to which of them, before we all hear the front door sling open.

"Missy!"

I turn just in time to see Kelsea round the corner from the hallway into the living room. She freezes in her steps as she lays eyes on me, then Aries, then the stranger lurking in the other room.

It takes a second to really believe I'm seeing her before I jolt in surprise that it's really her.

"What are you doing here?" I ask and she chews her lip, looking between us all.

"On the phone." She says, cautious, watching the others in the room like a nervous cat ready to run. "I had to come back and check on you and then when I saw his car..." she glances at Aries.

His shoulders slump forward and he sits in a huff onto the loveseat. "She's making sure I wasn't in here murdering you like I did to everyone else."

"No, I'm sorry, it's not-." She stops herself. "I just had to come back, Missy. You didn't sound good."

"I wasn't." I admit.

"And...." She trails off, looking around again waiting for me to fill in the blanks her mind is stalling on.

I glance around the house.

Here I am, my past and my present.

All the different train tracks, colliding right here in my tiny haunted home.