By February, they signed the paperwork in the living room of a finished cabin. They called their daughter Logan.
And everything was perfect.
Brandon Woodley once thought of himself as a man in two parts. He was alone and then not. He was the Brandon before Alejo, and the Brandon after. He was the Brandon who sensed shadows under his feet, and then he was the Brandon who felt the sun. But things were different with Logan. His life was not in two parts, or even three—it was a song, and all along it had been swelling toward this. He sat at the piano bench most afternoons and watched sunlight ripple across the floorboards. He watched Alejo on the couch, on the rocking chair, on the front porch with Logan tucked in his arms. He watched Logan grow taller, watched her smile, watched her skip between low-hanging junipers along the lakeshore. Brandon felt the sun on his face and the cool piano keys under his fingers and breathing was easy.
There was a small tremor in his chest that promised it would end soon.
2007
By the time they took Logan to the hospital, there was nothing to be done. The doctors said sometimes, this happened. Children got sick. It could happen to anyone. People lost their daughters all the time—sometimes, there wasn’t a reason why.
Brandon did not cry.
There were no tears in him—there was nothing at all. He was hollow without her. They’d been so close to having a life and he’d made the mistake of thinking it could last. They’d fought through thickets of hate and isolation just to end up here. Childless and alone again. Everything was carved away, scraped from his bones, left bare and numb. There had been warmth in him once that sounded like piano strings and Logan’s laughter and water on the lakeshore, but it was all black and twisted now.
Logan was five years old.
She would never make it to six.
“We’ll be happy again,” Alejo breathed into Brandon’s chest. They sat alone in the cabin; it had never felt lonely before Logan, but without her, he felt every inch of the aching space they’d built. “One day, we’ll be happy.”
But Brandon wouldn’t be happy. He would never be happy if she was gone. The articles that Alejo read told him that the pain would subside eventually, but Brandon Woodley had been in pain his whole life. He’d never loved anyone like he’d loved her—losing her wasn’t a pain that would ever subside. It was endlessly consuming, this hate. He hated this cabin, hated Snakebite, hated Tammy Barton and her perfect blond child who was so, so alive. Tammy would see her daughter grow old, but Brandon wouldn’t. He hated every person who lived while his daughter was gone. The hate welled up in him like a stain. It changed everything in him until it was the only thing left.
Brandon Woodley knew he would never feel the sun again.
They continued on like this—Alejo slowly learning to heal and Brandon simply not. Snakebite First Baptist Church staunchly refused to sell them a plot in Snakebite Memorial, claiming they were only for members of the church, and the hate in Brandon’s chest grew. They buried their daughter in Pioneer Cemetery among the decades-dead founders of Snakebite. She had no headstone, no service, no one to mourn her but her fathers.
Parents weren’t supposed to see their children’s graves. They weren’t supposed to feel darkness under the earth, coiling around their daughter’s corpse. Alejo said they would be happy again, and maybe he would. Of the two of them, he’d always been better at being a person.
But Brandon wasn’t a person anymore—the darkness that lingered under Snakebite grabbed him at his every step. He felt it there.
On the night it happened, he stood in the center of the cabin facing the window that looked over the lake. He couldn’t remember why he stood there, only that it was right. He’d had weeks of this—seeing faces just beyond his peripheral vision, hearing voices too quiet to understand, feeling fingertips on his skin—but tonight was different.