There is no light at the end of the tunnel for us. We are who we are.

Emily, there are enemies everywhere. We have to be on our guard, especially for the next couple of weeks._ Theo sighed unhappily. __his is going to be the longest fortnight of my life._ __hat__ saying something,_ I joked, __iven how long you__e lived._ __xactly,_ he said, without smiling.

Hidden in a toolbox, in the rafters of his four-car garage, was an envelope full of pictures taken by a private detective...They were pictures of a scrawny, boyish looking nine year old with a wide mouth and a tangle of brown hair...Her eyes were oblong and deep set, their color hidden from the camera by the slant of the sun. The angles and planes of her face were oddly beautiful just then, in that moment, frozen on Kodak paper. A hint of the woman she would someday become.

It felt oily inside her head. There were strings of Xavier Stancliff caught inside of her, holding on and spiderwebbing out as he plotted and waited and thought: this is all the bitch deserves. Swallowing, Sandra pushed herself off the bed. It was late and the room was dark. She could see the bundled lump of Jack beneath his own covers. He__ left the television on and the light flickered down the tiny hall. Shadows danced and Sandra shivered as she left the room.In another life, she would have told Danny and Jack about the man. Danny would have whispered, __t__ alright,_ and smoothed back her hair from her face and kissed her, lips dry and coarse on her forehead. Then he and Jack would__e left while she was sleeping. They would__e trampled the flowers and climbed into Xavier Stanliff__ window and when Sandra woke up there would have been one less man in the world.

It happened during the winter of 1973, when evenings rang out stillborn from far across the weathered moorland, and snow fell hard and heavy and clung atop the peppered veins of nature__ tough bracken, all picture-postcard like.

My mother used to say not sleeping was the sign of a guilty mind. It could have been. There was a lot in my mind to feel guilty about. When you__e drunk and trying to sleep, your thoughts are visited by the ghosts of those deeds whose heat still glows hottest in your personal darkness. Our actions burn much longer than the moments in which they occur. And drunks like me, we hide from the glow of the embers by fueling other fires and hiding within the flames.