Prologue
When I was a kid, my monster wasn’t under my bed. My monster took me to school every morning and sat with me at the dinner table every night.
My monster would come into my room once he finished attacking my mom. Once, she was too hurt and weak to protect me. I’d lie there, covers pulled tight around me, hoping they would keep him out. They never did.
One time, Mikey, my oldest sister, ran into my room and tried to cover me with her body. One night she even tried to fight him, but that night was the worst for her. He left her with a broken arm, a blackened eye, and a busted lip. My mom told the school principal that Mikey had chickenpox. It was always the flu, a fall, or something, anything to hide the terrible truth about the monster.
The nights Mikey or Mom couldn’t fight him away, he came for me. He ripped the covers off and lifted my nightshirt. Then came those dreaded words: “Let me see.”
That was the only way to stop his rage. He needed to see. Every night, I let him see until the night of my fourteenth birthday. That night, seeing wasn’t enough.
It’s been three years since that night. My sisters remember the sirens, the police, and the chaos, but I remember the moment before the chaos. The moment that changed me forever. The moment my mom and my sisters will never know about.
When the monster went away, my mom decided we were fixed. Within a year, she was dating Grant, her boss. A year after that, we were loading boxes into a car to move into his house on a compound outside the city. My sisters and I had only met him once before she told us we were leaving everything familiar.
I didn’t sleep the night before we arrived. I kept thinking about men in houses, about what they do when no one’s watching. I kept thinking about whether the universe was setting me up for another version of the same story.
When we pulled up the drive, I saw the compound for the first time. The grass was green. The sky was impossibly blue. The front door stood open like it was waiting.
I wondered if there were monsters here too.
