PROLOGUE
Drenched by the pouring rain, Celeste Myers threw the front door to her home open and slammed it behind her. As the rain drained from her clothing and hair, it was hard to differentiate the tears. She sobbed, ripped her coat off and threw it angrily at the wall, sending water splashing away from it on impact. She dropped to her knees and cried.
The storm raged outside, pummeling the house with heavy rain. An impressive lightning show snaked through the sky to a continuous booming melody of thunder. The storm came after the dinner date, but an inner storm had been swelling for some time. Celeste just didn’t realize it. It crashed and boomed just as the thunder and lightning outside did. It, too, was a damaging storm.
She heard a door open upstairs and quickly stood to her feet, wiping the snot and tears from her face with the sleeve of her dress. “Nico?”
“Mom?” a teen boy curiously called from upstairs. The light in the stairwell flipped on and Nico came jogging down the stairs in a pair of track pants and a sweatshirt that highlighted the football team at his high school.
Celeste didn’t have time to cover her tracks. Her eyes were burning from the tears, her voice was nasally, and her wet coat was on the floor soaking into the carpet. Nico was bothered by the state in which he saw his mother.
“What’s wrong? Where’s Dad?” Nico asked.
Celeste thought only briefly about coming up with some kind of lie to tell her son, but she knew he wasn’t stupid. He was an honor student and a star athlete at the high school. He was smart and probably saw all of this coming before she could. Her emotional state became almost bipolar. Where Nico saw sadness upon first laying his eyes on her, was now replaced by anger and humiliation.
“Where’s your father?” Celeste mocked. She laughed. “Where do you think he is, Nico? Where do you think your father is?”
Nico couldn’t tell if she was joking, serious, or if her question was rhetorical. He was confused. A general sense of anxiety built within him.
“What’s going on?” Nico begged, his face numb from the alarming nature presented in front of him.
“Like you don’t know,” Celeste snapped. Nico sensed a tremor in her voice. Something about his dad had seriously upset her; her emotional distress haphazardly danced the line between anger and shame.
“I don’t!” Nico yelled, more out of frustration than anything. “Tell me. Where’s Dad? What happened?”
Celeste looked her son in the eyes, wondering if maybe he didn’t know anything after all. This wasn’t his fault. Celeste recognized her outburst. She sniffled and closed her eyes, trying desperately to hold off the swelling tears.
“Your dad has been cheating on me for months. His little underage floozy happened to show up at the restaurant tonight with her parents.” Celeste threw her head back to try and catch her breath. Those were words she never thought she would say.
Nico stood there, speechless. His face burned with the surreal feeling that this wasn’t reality. His dad wouldn’t do that. He couldn’t. They were a perfect family. Nico, Celeste and Bowen Myers. They were respected in town, at their jobs and in school. Nico shook his head, disbelief making it hard for him to speak.
“That can’t be right,” he was finally able to mutter.
“Oh, it is,” Celeste said with a maniacal smile. “Trust me. There’s no doubt. He came clean as he crawled out of that restaurant behind me, begging me to stop.”
Nico thought back to his mother’s words: underage floozy. “How underage?”
Celeste’s smile vanished in the blink of an eye as she pointed to Nico’s sweatshirt. He looked down, seeing the Tiger that represented his high school. He snapped his attention right back to his mother.
“A high school girl?” Nico shook his head in disbelief, swallowing hard; his stomach turned.
“Sick,” Celeste growled. For the first time since Nico came down the stairs, his mother moved. She locked the front door and then swiftly blew past Nico. As she ascended the stairs, Nico was left in the living room, confused and frail. Thunder crashed again outside, lightly rattling the pictures of their once happy family on the walls, shelves and mantle.
“Well, where is he?” Nico called up to his mom, just as she hit the landing and then disappeared. “Mom?”
He heard the bedroom door shut and then let out a huge breath. His chest trembled with a rapidly beating heart beneath it.
***
The storm outside continued for the next several hours. The rain began to flood the normally pristine yards in the neighborhood, and the lightning continued to crack its way through the dark clouds like an ever-expanding spiderweb. Thunder clamored almost nonstop since the storm began.
Celeste lay in bed. Alone. The bedroom door was shut and locked to avoid Nico blasting in with his recently patented question of, “Where’s Dad?”
It shouldn’t matter where Dad is. He chose this. He chose the little skank over his wife of nearly two decades, she thought.
Celeste could hear him begging, pleading for her to stop in the restaurant parking lot and to just hear him out. She didn’t need to hear him out. It was all so obvious now. His late nights at work, his strange behavior with his cell phone and constantly clearing out his recent calls and texts. It was normal for text streams to build up, and she understood occasionally clearing them out, but it was only ever her, Nico and his best friend Silas that were visible.
God, did Silas know? she thought, assuming that snagging a pretty, young girl would conjure up jubilant talk between the two friends. She felt sick just thinking about it. She thought that after nearly twenty years together, that not only would their relationship be safe and sound at this point, but she assumed she knew everything there was to know about Bowen.
She was wrong. You never truly know a person, unless you are that person, she thought. Secrets create a different person from the one you see. One secret could be so destructive.
The storm carried on outside. The rain continued to pound the roof. The thunder shook the walls and the lighting displayed the room in ominous shades of black and blue. Celeste rolled over and closed her eyes.
***
A wet hand slapped down, covering her mouth and jerking her from a deep sleep. She felt the pressure of someone climbing on top of her, straddling her and placing another strong hand around her neck. She tried to scream, but the hand on her mouth only pressed harder. She tried to kick, but the powerful force on top of her was too much. She was powerless against the attack.
Outside, the storm had subsided, but the faint flickering of lightning coming through the window bounced off the blade of a kitchen knife, gripped in the hand that had eased off of her neck.
Celeste’s eyes widened and she tried to scream, but it was cut short as the cold steel of the blade was dragged across her throat.
