AS EIGHTEENTH BIRTHDAYS WENT, it had to be the worst ever.
Fliss ran through the overgrown garden that wrapped itself around three sides of the beach house. She didn’t feel the sharp sting of nettles or the whip of the long grass against her bare calves because she was already feeling too many other things. Bigger things.
The old rusty gate scraped her hip as she pushed her way through it. Misery fueled every stride as she took the grassy path that ran through the dunes to the beach. No one could catch her now. She’d find a place away from everyone. Away from him. And she wasn’t returning home until he’d left. The birthday cake would stay uneaten, the candles unlit, the plates untouched. There would be no singing, no salutations, no celebration. What was there to celebrate?
Fury licked around the edges of her misery, and underneath anger and misery was hurt. A hurt she worked hard never to show. Never let a bully see you’re afraid. Never let yourself be vulnerable. Wasn’t that what her brother had taught her? And her father, she’d worked out long before, was a bully.
If she’d had to find one word to describe him it would be angry. And she’d never understood it. She got mad from time to time, so did her brother, but there was always a cause. With her father, there was no cause for the anger. It was as if he rose in the morning and bathed in it.
Words pounded in her head, matching the rhythm of her strides. Hate him, hate him, hate him…
Her feet hit the sand. The wind lifted her hair. She gulped in another breath and tasted sea and salt air. Squeezing her eyes against the tears, she tried to replace the sound of her father’s voice with the familiar soundtrack of seagulls and surf.
It should have been a perfect summer’s day, but her father had a way of sucking the sunshine out of the sunniest day, and no day was exempt. Not even the day you turned eighteen. He always knew how to make her feel bad.
She tried to outrun her feelings, her breath tearing in her chest and her heart pounding like fists on a punching bag.
You’re nothing but trouble. Useless, no good, worthless, stupid—
If she was as worthless as he believed then she should probably run into the ocean, but he’d be pleased to be free of her, and she was damned if she was going to do a single thing that might please him.
Lately she’d made it her life’s focus to live down to the low opinion he had of her, not because she wanted to make trouble but because his rules just didn’t make sense and pleasing him was impossible.
The cruelest part was that he wasn’t even supposed to be here.
The summer months were their oasis of time away from him. Time spent with her siblings, her mother and her grandmother while her father stayed in the city and took his anger to work every day.
She’d grown to love those precious weeks when sunlight burst through the darkness and all she trailed into the house was sand and laughter. They stayed up late and woke in the mornings feeling lighter and happier. Some days they carried their breakfast to the beach and ate it there right by the ocean. This morning’s choice, her birthday breakfast, had been a basket of ripe peaches. She’d been wiping the juice from her chin when she’d heard the wheels of her father’s car crunch on the gravel of the beach house.
Her twin sister had turned pale. Her peach had slid slowly from her fingers and thudded onto the sand, the fruit instantly transformed from smooth to gritty. Like life, Fliss had thought, hiding her dismay.
Her mother had panicked, thrusting her feet into her shoes while trying to tame wind-blown hair with a hand that shook like the branch of a tree in a storm. During the summer she was a different woman. An outsider might have thought the changes were a result of the relaxed pace of beach life, but Fliss knew it was due to being away from their father.
And now he was here. Intruding on their blissful beach idyll.
Her brother, calm as always, had taken control. It was probably just a delivery, he’d said. A neighbor.
But they all knew it wasn’t a delivery or a neighbor. Their father drove the same way he did everything, angrily, revving the engine and sending small stones flying. Angry was his calling card.
Fliss knew it was him, and the sweet-tasting peach turned bitter in her mouth. She was used to her father ruining every