The Girl in the Mirror (Sand & Fog #3) Read online

  The Girl in the Mirror

  Sand & Fog Series

  Book 3

  Susan Ward

  Copyright © 2016 Susan Ward

  All Rights Reserved.

  All Rights Reserved. In Accordance with the US Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher or author constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Warning: The Girl in the Mirror has strong sexual themes and violence, which could trigger emotional distress. This story is NOT for everyone.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Quote

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Part Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Part Three

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Epilogue

  Excerpt The Girl on the Haf shell

  Excerpt The girl of Sand & Fog

  Excerpt Broken Crown and The Signature

  About The Author

  About the Book

  The Girl in the Mirror is the third standalone book in the Sand & Fog series. This book has a HEA.

  I don’t know why what happened to me shocks people. Everything about me is perfectly logical. Down to my three obsessions: ballet, sex, and food. Yep, food, though it might seem strange to put that one on that list, but it isn’t, not really.

  All three bring me pleasure and pain.

  All three demand the same commitment from me. Total discipline and control coupled with an ability to let completely loose and surrender to reward through agony and beauty through sacrifice.

  See, completely logical.

  Until it wasn’t and sent me into a downward spiral that seemed out of nowhere to everyone in my life except Jacob Merrick.

  He saw through me from the start.

  But that didn’t stop me from going to bed with him.

  What I didn’t expect was for Jacob to become the guy who saved me from myself.

  The Girl in the Mirror is an intense coming-of-age romance about addiction and love, sacrifice and mistakes with a poignant and unpredictable happily ever after.

  The game we all play is the same. It’s a simple war we fight every day: what we allow ourselves to see and remember.

  How we balance our scale.

  More good or more bad.

  The things we give importance to and the things we let be. In truth, all our scales, regardless of what we’ve done with our lives, are equal. They are equal at our birth and equal at our death, and not a single act between the two changes any of it. We live, we die, we love, and we lose. And everything else doesn’t matter. In the giant scheme of things no person is greater than any other, and our only purpose is to love, and if we miss that we are nothing.

  ~ Jackson Parker

  Prologue

  “Krystal”

  I don’t look like my mother or my father. Somehow through the random magic of gene selection I ended up looking like neither of my parents. I have dark hair, but it isn’t inky black like my dad’s or golden blond like my mom’s. My eyes resolved on their own to be gray instead of blue, though everyone likes to say they’re blue when they are really not because that’s a celebrated Parker trait from my mom’s side of the family. I’m neither tall like my father nor short like my mother. I come in at a nondescript five feet six inches.

  My personality—now, that’s another story. The result of random gene selection, too, no doubt. Or perhaps I should say God’s wicked sense of humor. Or maybe just cosmic unfairness. You see, somehow I ended up with all the strengths and flaws of both my parents, a perfect hybrid of the best and the worst of Chrissie and Alan. It’s an overwhelming burden to be gifted with it all, and if the word equality had been invented for any situation it was this: the equitable distribution of your parents’ defects.

  It would have been fair if the flaws had been equally doled out among all five of us kids, and if my brothers and sisters had gotten their fair share of the family legacy.

  But that’s not how life works. At least not for me. And it hasn’t been really bad. Not really. At least I didn’t think so until that day.

  Nope, not going there, to that part of my story, not yet. We don’t know each other well enough. You’re still like everyone else I meet: you think you know me because you think you know Chrissie and Alan. And you would be wrong.

  You don’t know any of us. Not really. Fuck, I’m their daughter and I don’t really know them. My entire theory could be completely wrong. It is predicated on the notion that I know and understand my parents, and that somehow provides meaningful insight about me.

  Really, isn’t that what we all think? Ground zero of who we are, for better or worse, is our parents. When we look in the mirror, we don’t really see ourselves, but a fast shifting, morphing figure—you know, like the opening credits on Roseanne or something. Fat to thin, pale to tan, features heavy to plastic-surgery perfect with lift—only it’s not me I see morphing in the mirror, it’s them blurred like a meme shading me out of the reflection.

  OK, are you following? Crap, haven’t any of you ever felt this way? Fine, allusion too vague and I know that TV show is from back in the day. Go look it up if you’re not following me here. Shit, am I the only one who watches entirely too many late-night reruns?

  Well, I didn’t used to pass my nights watching the flat screen. I was famous once. A famous ballerina. Unfortunately, with too much name and not enough talent. That was the recipe for my downfall, the not enough talent part. Don’t get me wrong, I was a good dancer, just not gifted. I knew it and so did everyone else—except for perhaps my parents—and I went farther in the dancing world than I should have thanks to my pedigree. I suppose I should be grateful, but right no
w it’s freaking hard to feel grateful about anything—oh no, rewind, I’m not going to tell you that part yet.

  Someone once told me that extraordinary people are doomed to live stupid lives. They weren’t talking about me. They were talking about my parents, trying to tie up the convoluted history of Chrissie and Alan into a neat, nice, simple theory in a way they thought a ten-year-old child would get.

  Yep, I asked questions like that at ten. How could my parents screw up everything so completely for so many years when it’s obvious they have always loved each other?

  And the answer I got back: Extraordinary people are doomed to live stupid lives.

  It was probably a mistake to pose that question to Linda Rowan, but my options were decidedly few. As far back as I can remember my mom has only had two friends—Rene Thompson, who we rarely ever see, and Linda Rowan, who I probably shouldn’t count because she’s sort of quasi-family and one doesn’t count their relatives as friends. Do they?

  Wait—are you telling me you didn’t notice this about my mother? The fact that she has hardly any friends. It’s meaningful and significant. It’s all part of the theory—extraordinary people are doomed to live stupid lives. Trust me, it is.

  What? Oh crap. You don’t know anything about my parents—Chrissie Parker and Alan Manzone. How is that possible? Do you live in a cave or something? Fine. The abridged version in under thirty seconds.

  Let’s start with their similar backgrounds. Both my parents are famous musicians, musical geniuses. My mom is a singer-songwriter and my dad a world famous guitarist and the iconic lead singer of the hard rock band Blackpoll. They were both famous the second they took their first breath of air on this earth. Both rich. Both extraordinary.

  My mom’s dad is Jackson Parker. Yep, that’s him. The guy they call the voice of a generation because of his music and activism in the ’60s. My dad is the fourth generation of a renowned British theatrical family. Yep, Dad started out in the theater. Made some pretty good films, too. Enough that he won an Oscar at eight—wait, forget that part. We don’t talk about that history because he didn’t like the film industry, or maybe it was Grandma Lillian, so he ditched his family, ditched his name, became a world famous rocker, and the rest is pretty much history.

  How they met, that part of their story, is rather simple. They met at Grandpa Jack’s, though nothing really kicked up that first night together in Santa Barbara. It all happened later when Mom went to New York City for her Juilliard audition and instead hooked up with fresh out of rehab Pop. If the stories in the tabloids are to be believed, they had quite a hot and heavy thing going for three weeks before Grandpa Jack dragged Mom home to California.

  Now here’s the part that will make your head spin. It makes mine spin. Somehow they remained together and in love, without being really together, for over twenty years. They both married twice before they married each other. Dad’s wives were luckier than Mom’s husbands. Both her husbands died. We should probably give Pop props for being willing to be Chrissie’s third trip to the altar.

  This is the part people go crazy over. Us kids. Somehow there are five of us, and four of us didn’t know we were Alan’s kids until after they finally married. Yep, I know. You want a pretty, wrap it in a ribbon, tie it in a bow kind of explanation for that, but hell, I don’t have one. I’m just the daughter, remember?

  And I’ve got my own shit I’m still working through even though it’s been twelve years since that landmark moment when I found out I wasn’t Jesse Harris’s daughter—husband number two for Chrissie. I thought I’d help you out here in case you were having trouble following—and that my biological dad is Alan Manzone.

  I know it sounds extreme, our version of the modern family, and you are probably there thinking it’s gotten me pretty messed up. You know, that part about me thinking Jesse was my dad until the age of nine and finding out my real dad was someone else.

  It wasn’t really like that. We sort of morphed into a pretty good thing. One family, five kids, two superstar careers, and happily ever after the Chrissie and Alan way. And I love my parents. They are extraordinary people. Flawed and human like all of us, and I truly admire their willingness to stick it out, keep slugging, to finally get things right when everything was always so chaotic between them.

  But I won’t lie. I still wonder—though I’ve never dared to ask my mom—how could you have five kids with Alan without being with him? Did you time it? Is it a cosmic joke? And the most important question—no, I’ve never dared to ask either of my parents this—how could two people who love each other so much mess up so much for so many years?

  Of all the questions I have, that’s the one, if I had to pick only one, that I would want the answer to. Linda Rowan’s answer really didn’t do it for me—extraordinary people are doomed to live stupid lives.

  Now that I’m twenty-one, I wonder why the hell someone would say such a thing to a child, even a woman as odd as Linda. It would piss me off, the idiocy of the explanation, except it was probably the most prophetic thing anyone ever said to me. And with my current predicament, it’s becoming a handy slogan.

  When people come to visit me, wanting to be supportive of where I’ve landed myself or just trying to understand how I got into this winner of a place in life, I just say cheerfully, “Extraordinary people are doomed to live stupid lives.”

  What I don’t get is why that works. Why everyone just backs off, and then goes away whenever I say it. People—I don’t get them. I never have.

  I’m extraordinary like my parents that way.

  Chapter One

  White wall, white wall, glass wall, white wall, and ceiling. That’s my world now, but inside my head I dance. Five, six, seven, eight. Arm high, shoulder down, extend through the leg, toe pointed—

  Searing hot pain blasts upward from my ankle like a flash fire across my flesh. Fuck, I pointed my toe in the real world and not my head.

  “Krystal, stay still.” I hear a voice—beloved, but not the one I want. “Don’t move, sunshine. You’re in the hospital. Remember? Your leg is in traction. The doctor said it’s healing well, but don’t try to move. You have to stay still to get better.”

  My lids lift, which is a mistake because I don’t want to see this.

  Reality—not the one I want. No stage. No audience. No elegant movement of my body before an enthralled crowd. Black eyes stare at me, heart-wrenching with worry, instead of hazel eyes lush with love watching from the wings…hazel eyes.

  I slowly move my gaze around the room.

  White wall.

  White wall.

  Glass wall.

  White wall.

  My father hovering beside the bed.

  My logic rebels.

  This image can’t be real. This isn’t how I remember my dad, not at any time since my birth. Alan looks old, frazzled and discomposed in a way that makes him strange and alarming and unfamiliar. No, that’s not my father. It can’t be. It hurts too much to see in his eyes and on his face the truth of me. Knowing I’m the cause of him looking that way.

  No, this is not reality. This is the nightmare. I, Krystal Harris, do not exist here anymore. I’m only real inside my head so long as I never let myself be here.

  Five, six, seven, eight…

  “They brought your dinner,” Alan says, moving to retrieve a tray from the table. “You should try to eat, baby girl. It’s what will get you well. You need to start eating so you’ll be strong enough to come home where you belong.”

  I belong?

  I close my eyes.

  I can’t ever go home again. It would kill me. It’s why I don’t speak. Why I count the walls. Why I don’t eat. I can’t go home knowing you know…

  I feel something touch my lip and look up to find my dad holding a spoon and waiting patiently for me to take a bite of that institutional-grade chocolate pudding.

  I can’t eat. Not that. I tighten my lips against the spoon.

 
; My dad’s eyes liquefy. “I know it’s not very good, Krystal, but you have to eat what they bring you. Later, you can have what you want. But for now you’ve got to eat every bite of this.”

  I look away. Where’s Jacob? I haven’t seen hazel eyes since I got here. I’m pretty sure he was here when I was first brought in. Why haven’t I seen him since? How could he leave me?

  I anxiously search the room again, halting to stare at the closed door.

  I hear the spoon being set down and my dad pushes the bed table back so he can sit beside me. “There’s no need to worry, Krystal. No one is ever going to harm you again. Graham Carson is right outside the door. Dillon’s at the end of the hallway, and Brayden’s in the lobby. No one is ever going to hurt you again.”

  Graham Carson? Dillon? Brayden?

  Why isn’t Jacob here?

  He’s my bodyguard—everything inside me starts to twirl—no, that’s wrong. He’s more, so much more…

  The pain suffusing my heart compels me to speak. I need to know what’s happened to Jacob. I struggle to push out the words. “Where…is—”

  “Oh, thank God.” My father’s low, raspy voice gushes over my breathy, near-soundless utterance. His eyes go wide since I haven’t managed to speak before now. His gentle, roughly callused hands close over mine. “Your mother is just down the hall in the waiting room. They only let one of us sit with you at a time. Everyone is here, sweetheart. Your brothers and sisters. Madison. Jack and Linda. The entire family. We’ve all been here, every minute since Graham brought you home to us.”

  Graham brought me home?

  No, no, no.

  Jacob brought me here, Daddy.

  Jacob saved me, not Graham.

  How could my dad get that wrong?

  Terrifying images flash in my head of things I don’t want to remember.

  Juarez.

  The flight home.

  Blood. The panic in the plane. It wasn’t because of me. The blood was Jacob’s. Not mine.

  “Do you want me to get your mother?”

  I shake my head.

  “Can you try to eat?”

  I shake my head.