All My Darkest Impulses (House of Crows), Lisa Unger [top 10 novels .txt] 📗

history of violence, as did another branch of the family, the Brandts.

Staring at the screen, she drew in a deep and shuddering breath. Of course, she thought. How had she not connected the dots before? Surely Dr. Bold would call it out as repression, tag it as one of the subconscious reasons she’d kept working with Winston when she should have walked away.

The light in the room changed, and Claire’s coffee had gone cold. She sat with it all.

Finally, her email pinged, and the sound, though soft, seemed to echo. She switched windows, and in her in-box, she was surprised to see the name Matthew Merle, as if she’d somehow conjured it. And she wasn’t surprised. Because hadn’t she known on some level that this was coming? Hadn’t it always been coming?

The subject line: Back at Merle House.

They’d stayed in touch over the years, mainly via social media. She knew he was married, with a daughter. He’d recently left his tenured professorship, suddenly, which didn’t happen without a reason. But she didn’t know what had happened. She still thought about Matthew, her first crush, that last summer together.

As she read, the sun outside moved behind the clouds, and the room grew darker. Matthew had moved his family into Merle House, hoping to fix it up and sell it. Anyway, he wrote, some things have come up. Questions. He wondered if she’d come for a visit. Maybe they all needed some closure, as he put it. It seemed like a strange request, and yet, it wasn’t.

And she found that, yes, she did in fact want to go back for a visit.

The fog descended and swirled, taking her breath as she read. When she was done, Archie was lounging on the couch, feet up, leaning on one elbow and wearing an easy smile.

The barely healed bite on her neck started to ache.

“Claire,” he said, his voice low and dulcet. “You didn’t think a few meds and some daily exercise were going to get rid of me, did you?”

“No,” she admitted, her voice just a whisper.

“It’s time for us to go home.”

He was right, of course. She was always going to go back to Merle House. And to Havenwood. It had only ever been a matter of when. She saw that now. Claire quickly tapped out a response, then rose to start packing.

7.

Why were her parents still married? Most of Jewel’s friends were the children of divorce, shuttling between homes, splitting holidays, getting tons of stuff—iPads, swag from Supreme, clothes from Neiman Marcus—from guilty dads who had hot young wives and new babies. Jenna had even gotten a Vespa (which her mother wouldn’t let her ride, but still!). Why did her mom stay with her dad? He was not her equal in looks or intelligence. He’d cheated on her. When she had cancer. Of course, he swore his innocence. But no one believed him—especially not Jewel.

She watched her parents from the window as they walked hand in hand out to the barn with Avery March, whom Jewel liked to think of as Lurch. Taller than her dad, with wide shoulders and longish gray-black hair, the Realtor moved beside them with an odd loping gait. There was something wrong with that person. The woman had secrets, was running some kind of an agenda known only to her. And neither of Jewel’s parents could see it because they were so desperate to sell this place.

I hate him, she typed into the text chain she was having with Eldon. Her nails were a wreck, the polish chipping, her cuticles ragged; she hadn’t had a manicure since they’d come to Hurl House, which was what she thought of this dump. It made her want to hurl.

No you don’t, Eldon wrote back. He’s your dad. You might be mad at him. But you don’t hate him.

How do you know?

Because sometimes I get so mad at my dad that I think I hate him. And then by dinner we’re joking around about something again. And then I feel bad for hating him, because he’s just—my dad.

Did he cheat on your mother, lose his job, and move you from your life to the middle of nowhere?

Uh, no.

Okay then.

Hang in there, okay? Things will get better.

She shouldn’t even be talking to Eldon—because she had no idea who he was. She’d met him on Red World, a shooter/world-building game, the new thing everyone was on now. Eldon had been invited to the group, which included most of her friends from Florida—he was a friend of a friend, she guessed. He’d bailed her out a couple of times in the game, once healing a wound with his virtual bandages, once carrying her after she’d been shot.

After that they’d started chatting, and after a couple of weeks they’d exchanged numbers in private messages—which was like a never do. Internet Safety 101. But they’d only ever texted.

She hadn’t told him anything about herself, really, not where she lived, not her social media; no FaceTime, no voice calls. He never pressed for that and she never offered. He could be anyone—a fifty-year-old sex predator in Scottsdale, a twelve-year-old boy in Tampa, a lonely lesbian in Oslo. Or he could be a Chris Hemsworth look-alike who would one day ride in on a Harley and take her away from the mess her parents had made of her life.

Not knowing was one of the nice things about their relationship. It was kind of distilled, purified to its essence, stripped of all the uncomfortable details of real life. He could be anyone. It didn’t matter at all. He was just Eldon—whom she liked. He was kind, smart, and always there. Still, she’d had too many lectures about internet predators not to be leery, and she was careful not to share too much.

Okay, maybe she’d slipped up just one time? In a torrent of complaints she’d issued about the weird town they’d moved to, she might have mentioned the town name, but not