Where We Burn (Rosewood Falls #1)

Prologue

PIPER

When your earliest memory is a full-blown shit show starring your drunk mother, who decided that beating the hell out of you was an appropriate response to washing your dolls in a bathtub she’d forgotten existed, you know you’re going to grow up a little messed up.

She was too wasted to remember how to get in the tub on her own, but somehow, she never forgot how to backhand a five-year-old clean across the face.

I was this tiny blonde thing with scraped knees and wide eyes, and that day shattered every bit of innocence I had left.

Her nail raked across my cheek, and I watched my own blood stain my fair hair crimson.

I remember standing there, too small to understand, thinking, Why did Mommy get so mad at me?

Years later, she had the audacity to tell me I should cut her some slack.

Because, you know, we were so broke that fresh water was a luxury, and she didn’t feel like “swimming around in a tub full of doll hair,” as if that somehow justified hitting me hard enough to draw blood.

Yellow and black strands floating in cold water apparently triggered her so badly that she forgot how to be a fucking human being.

If I could go back now, I’d wrap my arms around that little girl and hold her until the shaking stopped.

I’d smooth down her messy blonde hair, wipe the tears from her bruised cheeks, and whisper that none of this was her fault.

I’d tell her she wasn’t hard to love, wasn’t a burden, and sure as hell wasn’t a mistake who should’ve never taken her first breath.

I’d look into her eyes and remind her over and over that she was just a lost little girl suffering at the hands of a monster who never deserved her in the first place.

I knew I’d spend the rest of my life trying to wash that particular memory off my skin, and the second I turned sixteen, I marched into a drugstore and bought the blackest box of hair dye I could find.

Anything but red.

Red was officially banned forever.

Lorraine Nightengale was nothing but an abusive, bitter drunk with a bottle in one hand and a fist in the other. She was mean, spiteful, and had no business being anyone’s mother.

I lost count of how many times I found her passed out in corners, soaked in her piss, or slurring about how she wished she’d never had us.

She told Violet and me more than once that our deadbeat father, the same asshole who disappeared before I was old enough to remember his face, forced her to keep us and how she’d wanted to “take care of the problem” both times he got her pregnant, but he wouldn’t let her.

He walked out one day and never came back, and she was stuck with us and a life she didn’t ask for or know what to do with.

And she never let us forget it.

Violet kept me breathing when everything else tried to suffocate me. She put food in my stomach when I hadn’t eaten in two days, gave me a place to sleep when the yelling got too loud, and never once asked for anything in return.

Meanwhile, Lorraine—because calling her Mom would be an insult to actual mothers—just kept killing brain cells and blaming the universe for why she was such a waste of perfectly good oxygen.

Thank God for college. That was my lifeline. A shitty dorm with peeling paint and a squeaky bed? Heaven. Instant noodles five nights a week? Bliss. I’d take all of it ten times over if it meant I never had to hear my name slurred from across the room again.

I recently graduated, and the real world hit me like a brick to the face. I had nowhere to go but back home to the alcoholic who’d barely remembered to keep me fed, let alone raise me. Except now it was just me and her—two broken people trying to survive in the same broken space.

I should’ve moved to Rosewood Falls the second I left college, but I needed time to figure out what the hell I was gonna do. Turns out that the only thing I care about is living a quiet, happy life with my favorite people… and that starts with my sister.