I Was 33 When My Stepfather Hired A Sniper To KILL Me
Part 2
Rain ticked through the broken windshield. A pine branch scraped against the roof with the fingernails-on-a-casket sound that still wakes me sometimes. My phone had flown somewhere under the passenger seat. The dome light had come on crooked, flooding the ruined car with a weak yellow glow that made the blood look black.
I knew two things.
One: if the bullet had torn the heart open, I’d already be gone.
Two: whoever shot me might be coming down the embankment to finish the job.
So I did what I had done my entire childhood in the Marks household. I stayed quiet. I listened.
At first all I heard was rain. Then the distant ping of cooling metal. Then, after a long ten seconds that felt hand-stitched together by God himself, the soft crunch of boots in wet leaves above the ditch.
Not close. Watching.
I slid my right hand down, fingers searching blindly until I found the release for the seat belt. It snapped back with a harsh little whip. I froze. The footsteps stopped.
My own breathing sounded too loud.
I eased myself sideways, pain ripping hot and mean under my ribs, and pushed the driver’s door. It didn’t budge. The frame had crumpled. The passenger side window was blown out, but the angle was wrong, narrow and full of twisted glass. I tried anyway. The movement nearly made me black out. My vision tunneled. The rain on my face felt cold enough to hurt.
Above me, a flashlight clicked on.
A white circle drifted through the fog and brush, searching the ditch but not descending. Not yet.
I went perfectly still.
That was the oldest trick Evan ever taught me: if prey can’t run, it makes itself into landscape.
The flashlight beam skimmed over the hood, caught the shattered side mirror, and moved on. I could smell wet soil now, raw and mineral, where the car had gouged into the embankment. Blood dripped off my elbow and tapped the floor mat in slow, bright beats. I pressed my lips together so hard I tasted skin.
The light passed again, closer this time.
And then, from somewhere up the slope, a man’s voice said, “She’s hit.”
Another voice crackled through a radio I couldn’t see.
Don’t worry about that. Let her think.
I knew that voice before the sentence was over.
My stepfather wasn’t just on the phone.
He was there.
A shiver went through me so violent it made my teeth knock together. The flashlight beam paused as if the sound had carried. I slid one hand under the seat and touched my phone at last, cold and slick with muddy water. No service. One bar. Then none.
My thumb hovered over the emergency screen anyway.
Up above, the unseen man said, “You want me to go down?”
A beat of static.
Then Evan, almost gentle: “No. If she gets out, she’ll understand.”
The flashlight clicked off.
The footsteps retreated.
I lay there bleeding in the wreckage, rain dripping through the broken windshield and onto my throat, and understood something I should have admitted years earlier: he had never wanted love, and he had never wanted family. He had only ever wanted obedience.
And now I had survived long enough to disappoint him.
When my phone finally found enough signal to blink one weak bar back to life, a new message lit the screen from an unknown number.
Stay quiet, little soldier. Or next time he’ll let me finish.
My hand started shaking so badly I nearly dropped the phone. There in the ditch, with blood running warm into my waistband and rainwater pooling under my boots, I knew two things with absolute certainty: Evan Marks had ordered the shot, and somebody else had been taking orders from him for a very long time.
Then my screen brightened again with a second message — a single line that made the night around me turn even colder.
He’s not the first man your mother paid to protect him.
I still dream in floor plans from the house on the hill.
Not the whole house, just pieces of it. The front hallway with the umbrella stand my father bought in Savannah, carved with herons and cattails. The dining room with the long cherry table my mother polished every Sunday until she could see her own face in it. The upstairs landing where the runner rug always bunched in the same place. In dreams, I never see the rooms complete. I move through them the way you move through old trauma — by fragments, corners, objects that remember better than people do.
The dream usually starts with my father still alive.
He smells like aftershave and jet fuel and the peppermints he kept in his shirt pocket. He is bending to kiss the top of my head, his hand warm and heavy for a second against my hair, and I am ten years old and furious because he’s missed my school thing again. Some assembly, some presentation, some tiny kid-world event that felt enormous at the time.
“I’ll make the next one, Gussie,” he says.
He was the only person who called me Gussie.
Then the dream jumps.
Funeral lilies. Wet black umbrellas. My mother wearing a navy dress she already looks too small inside, as if grief has hollowed her out before the casserole dishes have even cooled. The house full of murmured condolences and coffee gone burnt on the warming plate. My father’s folded flag on the mantel. Me on the staircase, listening.
That was the first day I heard Evan Marks laugh in our home.
It was a low, practiced sound. Friendly if you didn’t know better. He’d been one of my father’s acquaintances from the base, a man whose uniforms always looked pressed by someone afraid of disappointing him. He had that kind of handsome that photographs well and ages into authority: square jaw, silver at the temples too early, shoulders held like he expected the room to clear a path for him.
“You’ll never have to worry again,” he told my mother in the kitchen, while I crouched on the stairs in my funeral shoes with my knees pressed to my chest. “I’ll bring discipline back to this house.”
Discipline.
Not comfort. Not help. Not kindness.
Even at ten, I knew that word had edges.
My mother married him nine months later.
After that, our house stopped being a home and turned into a system.
Six a.m. whistle.
Not metaphorical. An actual whistle. Thin and sharp, slicing through whatever sleep I’d managed to find. Then came made bed checks. Shoes lined under the dresser. Breakfast at seven with no reading material, no humming, no elbows on the table. Plates centered. Napkins folded. Milk glass on the right. Fork tines up. If I reached for the salt before being asked whether I wanted it, his eyes would settle on me with that cool, flat interest that made my spine lock.
“Ask,” he’d say.
If I forgot and spoke out of turn, he’d say, “Again.”
The punishment wasn’t always loud. That’s what outsiders never understand about men like Evan. Sometimes the cruelest thing wasn’t the yelling. It was the precision. He could turn correction into weather, something constant enough that you forgot it had been chosen.
Once, when I was eleven, I left a library book on the dining room table while I went upstairs to grab a pencil. When I came back down, he was standing over it. He picked it up with two fingers like it was evidence.
“What is this?”
“A book.”
His hand came down so fast the cover cracked against the wood like a gunshot. The china cabinet rattled. My mother, at the sink, flinched so hard she dropped a spoon.
“Orders first,” he said. “Learning later.”
My mother didn’t turn around. “He means well, Gus.”
I hated the sound of her trying to sound normal. It was thinner than tissue paper. I could hear her hands trembling in the tiny clinks of metal at the sink.
After that, I kept my books under my mattress.
I kept a lot of things hidden.
