This time, it's really too late.

*** References domestic violence, trauma, assault, murder and suicide. Reader Discretion advised.***

Are you there, God? It’s me… and this time, it is too late. Of the times I’ve failed you, I know - this is by far the worst.

Worse than when I’d secretly wished Lucinda had never fallen pregnant, the week we’d been at each other's throats like wolves, seeking a kill. Ravenous for domination, unwilling to relent to the pressure of a newborn baby and a bank account, diminished.

Worse than the time Lucy had used my brand new Ping driver as a piñata baton and I’d - not secretly - wished it again.

Worse than when I’d seen the way he’d looked at her during a quick visit from college - leering with perverted longing - and invited him to stay for the summer, anyway.

I made many promises, and I broke every single one of them. And yet -

I look down at my blood-soaked thighs, the predictable denim marred by a thick, tar-like sludge more closely resembling the depths of darkness than the gushing crimson Hollywood promised me. The stench of chemical-laden vomit filled the vast space.

I couldn’t bear to look at her - the delicate features passed down from her mother haunting in their lifelessness.

She didn’t deserve a death this gruesome.

I’ve never even entertained the idea of outliving my daughter.

Hers, a life… new and full of promise. Mine, a collection of missteps, pock-marked with the weight of consequence.

No - Lucy’s death was not something I planned for. And subsequently, I allow the reality of what is going on here to escape me, for a minute.

Moments we grossly underestimate and overlook often lead to our ultimate downfall. The thing we can’t outrun. Can’t bury. Can’t politely look past.

Like me, here - in the home I paid the downpayment on, yet never visited until tonight.

Like the scratch marks covering my arms - angry and red, raised and pulsing.

Like the heavy, stained bat in my hand.

Like my daughter drowning in her own blood after being bludgeoned to death by someone she loved, trusted. Someone who supposed to protect her.

They will be here soon.

And it won’t take long for them to do what they do - what they always did - in situations like these.

I’m only 64.

I will be okay on the inside, as they call it. Right? It can’t be as bad as what they make it out to be, can it?

I am too ashamed to talk to God now - to ask for comfort.

I don’t deserve comfort. I deserve the eternity of pain coming my way. Death, pulling at my heels - I’ll soon learn the outcome of my fated life.

I stand up without looking at her.

I can’t look at her - not like this.

I don’t want to remember her this way.

Shame, again.

It covers me entirely - the realization I am as much a coward now, as then. Back when I’d wished I never made Lucinda Gray pregnant.

And when I’d let that boy into Lucy’s life.

Back when she loved me -and trusted me with her best interests. Before he changed her entirely.

It was taking me a while to accept the backdrop to the worst day of my life - Lucy and Alec’s living room - was evidence of how hard it had been to let go of my daughter.

But it also screamed of how Alec changed who I’d known - her bold creativity and expressive perspectives hidden in the mundane, empty, Ikea-showroom style space.

His house.

Alec.

Breathe, Wilbur.

Breathe.

The lucky man.

Alec.

He’d been more fortunate than Lucy, getting away before I could do any real damage - connecting to his shoulder with a sickening crack, though not enough to prevent his hasty exit.

A pity, too.

I would have taken great pleasure in the sound of his skull cracking.

I’m sorry, God. I know - it would mean another broken promise. Another disappointment, but I have never wanted to hear anyone break, to hear the cracking of… this isn’t where I wanted this to go. I want to say sorry, but I’m not there yet, because I feel it. As as I try push the feeling down, it remains - a fierce, burning compulsion to destroy…

I’m seething with unbridled, animalistic rage. Alec at the center.

I bankrolled his pathetic existence, because I didn’t trust him to ensure his own wife - my daughter - had food to eat.

I disowned them after he’d moved into the house with Lucy, though I let them keep it. I wanted to convince my daughter to choose between the comfortable life I could give her, or one of toxic fixation.

But then came the pregnancy announcement. And the subsequent wedding.

And my real motivation set in. I could never set out to destroy him if it meant watching her suffer. She didn’t deserve that. Even if she did need to learn from her mistakes the hard way. To show her every action had consequences.

But, oh - she was always so delightful, my Lucy.

Never spoke back. Never fought with her mother over riding in cars with boys - even when mom went from Lucinda, to Marnie. No -

My Lucy was gentle and kind, an effervescence felt in every corner of every room. And she was seen. And heard.

A light as bright as hers seemed impossible to snuff - yet… the gruesome scene coating the ash-wood laminate floors around us spoke of a decidedly different fate.

I couldn’t look. Wouldn't look.

What have you done?

That annoying voice I couldn’t outrun.

Had never.

Been able.

To outrun.

Back - insistent and overwhelming in it’s…shape.

I don’t have time to let the voice win, not again.

It kept me from facing the reality of what had become of my daughter. Not allowing me a moment to grieve, despite knowing I don’t deserve it.

God… I can’t do it, please don’t ask me to.

Sirens blare in the distance, gaining with each second.

This is it.

They would be here, in less than a minute or two.

64 years here.

25 to life there.

No big deal. There wasn’t anyone left to miss me here. Not now Lucy is gone.

Her mother - my first wife - sweet Lucinda Gray, suffered a remarkably similar fate to our girl.

Gruesome. Unexpected.

The result of uncontrollable emotions.

They’re barging in, now.

And I have the right to remain silent.

I don’t leave anything to be used against me. And I, sure as the hell that awaited me, would be calling my own lawyer.

***

The place they’re keeping me wears the odor of sweat and mould like a signature scent.

I strain to find clues as to how long I’ve been here, but part of the psychological torture of this place is not knowing.

Anything.

The time, what will happening next, what they know, what they don’t.

I run through what I do know, again.

Lucy is dead. Her blood is - literally - on my hands. And my face. And my stupid $200 denim jeans.

I was the last person to see her alive.

Obviously.

And I had no time to clear out evidence of what was a clear motive. That wasn’t how crimes of passion worked.

She’d taken everything. Every last cent in her trust. A day over twenty-five and gone.

Alacazam.

Like my daughter had disappeared before my eyes two years before, so too did the money I hoped would get her out of here. Get her to start over, far away from him. But she’d changed more than I could have imagined.

The ugliness reared its head from within her, jarring. Unexpected.

She was more like Marie than I’d ever hoped she’d be.

A hotshot DA, righteous judge, and a ravenous team of lawyers, forensic accountants and experts will arrive at the conclusion I know is waiting for them. Not as fast as they do in the films - but they’d get there eventually.

I will - by all accounts - be labeled as a pathetic father, if the yard stick is planted anywhere within the last two years of our family chronology.

The lifeless figure of my only child was testament to that.

Would I even be given a trial? Or would it be straight to the electric chair, for me? I make a mental note to ask my lawyer.

Will they put me in a shared cell at my age? With no priors? My first wife died by suicide, and my second, gunned down outside a hotel room while visiting Thailand. Suspicious - but they’d never found a single trace leading back to me in either case.

Lucy had been a young girl when her mother died.

Old enough to appreciate the wonder of travel then, I convinced Lucinda to let me take her to Sydney to see my mother. A special, rare occasion for a grandmother separated from her granddaughter by thousands of miles.

I didn’t know how sick she had been, or I wouldn’t have left. I blamed myself for not noticing the change in her, since Lucy came along.

She was gone by the time we got back.

Marnie was different. For Lucy, and me.

Like we had gotten used to the stench of death - the impermanence of our own existence. We’d made peace with it.

Not to say it wasn’t terribly sad, what happened to Marnie.

But the investigation revealed a woman I didn’t know.

A woman who - horrifically - kicked a poor, defenseless, homeless man in front of an oppressed witness, who was hiding an unlicensed gun. Alec would become an orphan, that day.

Now, I have a dead daughter too. And I am the only other person in the house I paid for, with a trust emptied of 15 Million Dollars overnight.

I didn’t stand a chance in hell against the wrath of internet sleuths and sensitive dispositions. If they started looking, they would find everything they needed to burn me at the stake I knew already had my name carved deeply into it.

I let this reality set in, and slowly - started to accept it. It made room for me to feel for the first time, since her life slipped away in my arms.

Are you there, God? It’s me… and , I don’t think I have a lot left to lose here.

Okay.

I know I should have done more, for Lucy. I know when Alec looked at her that way, when the kids met for the first time - when she fifteen and he was a punk-ass junior in college - I should have listened to the voice in my head, screaming at me to keep him away from her. I shouldn’t have invited him to stay that summer - no matter how much I was trying to impress my new wife, to give the blended family thing a try. I shouldn’t have let my need to shake Lucinda, my fear of being a sad, lonely widow, outweigh what Lucy needed.

A father.

And I shouldn’t have pulled away when Marnie died.

Even as the disappointment of who she was, slowly killed what little hope I had left. The knowledge I’d chosen a rotten person over my own. My child. The only part left of my sweet Lucinda Gray.

I didn’t see them pulling toward each other, bonded by the trauma of what happened. Lucy loved Marnie. She was certainly the woman she associated with all of her firsts. And I put them there - right in the path of my Lucy’s fate. I am to blame for that. I will carry it for the rest of my life.

And I’ll dedicate whatever’s left to making sure cowards like Alec can’t hide in the shadows anymore. All that’s left to do is hope you’ll give me one last chance to keep my promise.

***

It had to have been at least twelve hours since I got here.

The smell is suffocating, getting worse with each exhale. The metallic stench of blood and sour vomit permeates the recesses of my mind, bringing it all back. I wish they would arrest me, so I could be stripped bare of every recollection branding my skin - other than the deep scratches, set to remain. They are burning. Reminding me of the moments before I failed Lucy one last time.

Failed to end this with the crack of the skull belonging to the man who’d taken her from me.

The dead space of the cell was killing me. The waiting - I wish they would get me to my final resting spot and call it a day.

A burly woman rounds the corner, keys jangling against her ample waist. She opens her mouth to speak to me, and I look around - disbelieving that anything changing now could be in my favor.

“Mr. Winthrow - you free to go, but we’d love to speak to you first.”

I felt the blood rush straight to my head, vision blurring.

Free to go? It couldn’t be.. How could? What happ…

I didn’t notice the gate opening until the sound of the creaking hinges was too loud to ignore.

***

It turns out a well-positioned camera could do the work of a hotshot DA, power hungry judge, ravenous team of overpaid lawyers and plenty forensic accountants, in a timeline that exceeded even my own lofty expectations, marred by fiction.

The footage was impossible to watch, in full.

Seeing Lucy in pain - battered and bruised, diminished by thrown fists and careless words alike. The control. Trust issues. Checking her phone every opportunity he got. Pushing her against walls, and worst of all - holding that baseball bat to her throat. More than a few times.

The signs had been there. She’d been collecting them, my clever girl - knowing no one was coming to save her.

That I would disappoint her again, even in her death.

She had called me incessantly last night. Why had I waited until the last minute? Until the calls turned into two minute intervals, before stopping suddenly?

I’d grown tired of her calls over the years - more desperate and pleading each time.

She wasn’t my Lucy, in those moments.

She chose a life I couldn’t agree to. Wouldn’t. And I gave her every opportunity not to. But it wasn’t my choice to make.

She wasn’t ready to make it, either. I should have fought harder to protect my little girl.

I came into the fold with clear intent - to kill Alec Lanset. I tried my best to take him down - the video evidence clear. But given I’d already placed the 911 call, my daughter already dead - I doubted anyone would push to see me go down for it.

Especially not after seeing Lucy’s eyes - helpless and defeated, knowing she was dead long before he ceased his merciless pounding.

As soon as I learned of the footage, I knew they would see me as a man ready to destroy the scumbag that had taken away his daughter.

What I had not expected was the message from Lucy.

Straight to camera. A miracle that would save what was left of my life.

“Dad. I know the last few years have been horrible. I haven’t been the Lucy you know. And I want you to know it’s not your fault. I was on a path no one could drag me off of. Not even a love as powerful as yours could have stopped it. Alec is a bad man. He was a bad boy, too. He ruined the way I see the world, dad. And I don’t want you to blame yourself for that, either. I loved Marnie, Alec too - but there is something wrong with them, Dad. I saw it in the small moments. And I know you were too numb to see it. Because of mom. Marnie changed you the way Alec changed me. Broke you down. Made you feel like you would never be enough. Soon, you weren’t… you, anymore. And Alec - he was everything I needed him to be then. It took a while for me to understand he was grooming me. And by the time I did - it was too late. I knew after we got married, after we had Frankie… the only thing keeping me alive was the trust in my name. And dad - I am twenty-five, now. I wanted to get you this message, sooner rather than later.”

“I don’t know what will happen in the next few days, but I have transferred the money from my trust to an escrow account he can’t get to. I don’t want to imagine the countless lives that would be ruined with that kind of power in his hands. And when he finds out…”

“I’ve had this here for a while, dad. I hope you’ll come, when I call - and if you do, everything you need to clear your name is right here. If you don’t come, it won’t matter - they’ll get to Alec, eventually. He is cunning, but careless. And if they don’t, I want you to know it’s not your fault.

I love you.

I forgive you.

And I hope you’ll forgive me too.”

She’d taken enough pills to numb the pain of her violent death. Knowing if she’d been wrong about Alec’s limits - she’d still finally get to see her mother again.