Chapter 1

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Hailey

My dad has a gun he thinks I don’t know about.

I found it yesterday in his bedroom. Technically, the place was supposed to be off limits, but I’m not too good with imaginary lines.  

Dad stepped out around noon—dragged his ten irons out the front door while I tiptoed down the hallway towards his room. He would’ve heard me if he’d been paying attention, but he never does.

Instead, he drowns his heart in his work, his golf, or his bourbon bottles most days. Golf days were the best days to take advantage of his distance. Golf days were the easiest days to get caught.

So I gave him a chance to catch me, to punish me, to notice me just once out of the many times I’d broken his rules. I creaked across his wooden floors before he was even out the door.

            “Hailey?”

His voice boomed up the stairs and rattled my heart against my ribcage. I plastered myself against the wall and held my breath until my lungs demanded me to breathe.

I sucked in a mouthful of dead air and waited for the sound of Dad’s footsteps to come clamoring towards me. Nothing moved. Nothing changed. So, I answered.

            “Yeah, Dad?”

I did it—gave away my position on purpose. All it took was two words.  He should’ve heard me. Questioned me. Caught me. I sounded too close to be in my bed, too close to not be standing right next to his ugly little room full of ugly little secrets. But he didn’t notice. He didn’t care to.

            “Remind the new cleaning woman that my room is off limits. I don’t want to have to fire anyone else for breaking my rules.”

He’d fired three maids in the last week because of me. Three maids who’d argued for their innocence, when their boss should’ve questioned his not so good little girl.

Three new tamper-proof locks he should’ve replaced. But he didn’t. He’d gotten sloppy lately—pre-election stress makes desperate senators fall apart at the seams. Dad was in shambles.

For five nights straight, I’d watch him bring home the kind of whispers that kept him up late on hushed phone calls, the kind that meant trouble.

Everyday, I’d ask him about work and everyday he’d say things were fine, just fine, but his lies always ended in long benders and lots of booze.

Booze meant the worst kind of secrets, the dangerous kind, the only kind worth snooping for.

            “Sure. See you later,” I said.

He answered with the click, click, clacking of the front door locking shut, so I went back to prying his bedroom door open. I pulled three bobby pins out from the long, auburn tangles of my hair and slipped the first one into his lock.

He had it manufactured special—senators-with-expensive-secrets—special, but I popped it open two bobby pins in. Persistence makes perfect, and like a cat-burglar-Alice in a Washington Wonderland, I snuck through the looking glass.

As expected, his bedroom was compulsively pristine, not a book out of place, not a drawer left unlocked, everything perfect— but only almost. A small stack of signed and stapled papers had spilled down onto his impeccably clean wooden floors.

Passable? Not even close.

Spills meant his world was off center. So I dug around for a real-life rabbit hole on the off chance that I’d find one. 

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