His face turned an even paler white than usual, but I still pressed on. “The ones that my mom used to buy for us and put out in the backyard on a blanket for us to build?”

“Yes,” David said hesitantly.

“There was one that was my favorite,” I said. “I think it had kittens on it and they were playing with yarn. Do you remember that one?”

The guys were staring at me as if I had completely lost my mind. But then, just as I thought they might be right and that I’d possibly made a very big mistake with this decision, David surprised me.

“Yeah actually,” he said. “I do remember that one. I always thought you hated that one. You got so frustrated with the little lines on the yarn balls and how long it took to match all those pieces up.”

I looked at David and saw a hint of a smile on his face. Not an evil, crazed smile, but an actual smile as if he were reliving a fond memory.

Can this actually work?

And I figured if it worked well enough to get him to put the knife down and come inside, it might just work for what we wanted.

Which was to move on from this hellhole and try to pick up the pieces of our lives.

Later that night, the guys crawled into bed with me and stayed closer than usual. I was glad that they did, too. After all the murderous things that David had done, there was absolutely no way that I could trust him, no matter how badly I wanted to believe he could change. Michael had given him a pillow and blanket for the couch and David curled up in front of the fire as we said goodnight and went into the bedroom. They locked our bedroom door tightly and had agreed that one of them would be awake during each part of the night to make sure David didn’t come crashing through the window trying to kill us.

I was asking a lot of them, again.

“Thank you,” I whispered to all three of them as we laid in bed around each other.

“We don’t understand it,” Adam said. “Not going to lie, I don’t agree with it one damn bit. But if this idea of yours works, and it’s able to bring you some peace and all of us the freedom to start over, then we’ll support you in every way we can.”

I honestly didn’t know if it would work. Hell, I didn’t even know if there had ever been anything inside of David that could be saved. But I owed it to my mom, and Julian, and all of us now to try. Maybe he just needed someone to love him and be kind to him. Maybe my mother was the only one that ever did and when she died, he had nothing. I knew what that felt like to lose someone and feel like you had nothing left. Except as bad as things got for me, I always had someone to grab onto. When my mother died, I had Julian. And with Julian dead, I now had Michael and Adam and Rob.

If I hadn’t had anyone at all, maybe I would have ended up just like David had.

I snuggled up deep against them and closed my eyes to sleep. And when I dreamt that night, my dream was only one simple, single image.

It was the face of my mother staring back at me and smiling.

And I knew I had done the right thing.

16

The guys didn’t trust David, rightfully so.

Of course, they didn’t, how could they? They treated him pretty horribly and watched him like a hawk. It didn’t seem to bother David too much, which was surprising. The giant ego that he had always carried around with him; the one that caused him to get offended by anything that set him off, seemed to lessen a little bit each day. I guess he knew that he had some stuff to work off and some stuff to prove before he could really earn anyone’s trust ever again.

The old David wouldn’t have cared about putting in the work or effort to do it. The old David would have ridiculed whoever didn’t bow down to him, or made them suffer until they did, or simply just done away with them entirely so that he could surround himself only with those that worshipped, or at the very least feared him enough to do as he said without question.

But this version of the David that was here now was molting. Shedding an entire history of himself that no longer served him as he painfully tried to be someone new.

I walked out from the bedroom in the morning with my T-shirt falling down around my bare thighs and the cool springtime mountain air drifting in through the windows. The soft gray T-shirt I was wearing was Adam’s. I liked to wear their shirts to sleep in, it was just one more layer of them that surrounded me. All three of the guys walked out from the bedroom along with me, all three shirtless and in cotton joggers that hung at their muscular waists and clung around their huge endowments. It was a sight to see I’m sure, me and them all pouring out of the opened door like one entity in the morning. If I was a storybook princess, then my three princes couldn’t have possibly been any hotter or more devoted.

Now if only the fairytale could just stay like this forever, with all four of us forever.

David was still asleep on the couch as the four of us came quietly out into the kitchen for coffee. His blankets were twisted tightly around him in knots, and it looked like he had a troubled night of tossing and turning in his sleep.

I wondered what his dreams and nightmares were made of.

I wondered if my mother’s face had smiled at him too in his sleep. I quietly brewed coffee in the French press and grabbed the kettle before it started to whistle. The guys stood around me in the kitchen and watched me as I stirred the grounds. It made me giggle a little underneath my breath; it wasn’t like David was going to kill me while he slept.

Still though, they were right to be super cautious.

When the coffee was ready, I poured it into cups, and we all went to sit down around the room, next to the empty hearth. Rob lifted his legs up and leaned back in his chair and then let his feet come down to rest on top of David’s sleeping body on the couch with a jarring drop. David scrambled to sit up as if he had been broken away from a deep sleep and the twisted blanket made him fall over onto the ground in a heap of disorientation. Rob and Adam laughed at the sight of the debacle, but Michael just quietly sipped his coffee as he watched with one hand resting on my thigh. I rolled my eyes at Rob; not everyone could come around to the quick catharsis that I had made so suddenly.

“Here,” I said to David as I handed him a cup of freshly brewed, hot coffee. “Ignore them.”

David was breathing hard and fast and it seemed like his heart was racing inside his chest by the look of panic on his face. I wondered what had been prowling in his sleep to make his sudden waking cause him such a panicked look. He sat back up on the couch and took the coffee from my hand as he kicked the tangled blankets off from around his ankles. He drank the coffee fast enough that it would have burned my mouth and then gave a satisfied sigh when he had emptied his cup.

“Would you like some more?” I asked.

I could feel the eyerolls from some of the guys, even if they were just doing it inside of their heads. They had trouble watching me be nice to the man that had caused us so much suffering and pain.

David nodded his head eagerly as if it had been the best tasting coffee in the world. “Yes, please,” he said.

I think we were all dumbfounded by hearing David use the world please. Maybe he took after our father more than he thought. Maybe his change of heart would be more fruitful than our fathers had been, considering David killed him before our father had a chance to truly try to undo any of the evils he had done.

When I got back from the kitchen a moment later and handed David a second cup, which he gratefully took with an earnest “thank you”, I thought about what I wanted to do today.

“Is there a store nearby?” I asked. “Like a big one that has all kinds of things.”

“Yeah,” Michael answered. “There’s a few. What do you need?”

I smiled softly. “I’d like to get some puzzles.”

Michael and I went together to the store after coffee, while Rob and Adam stayed behind to keep an eye on David. I imagined that they probably sat there staring at him the entire time we were gone. But when we returned the two men were sitting there around a newly-stoked fire and David was nowhere to be seen. I got nervous for a second that they had killed him and buried him in the garden.

“Where’s David?” I asked as we walked in.

“Taking a shower,” Adam answered.

Whew.

We had been able to pick up a few other things at the store while we were there, so now I had my own comfy pair of joggers to wear; the kind that had the little elastic bands which hugged around your ankles.

I went outside to the backyard with a blanket and a couple boxes of puzzles in my arms and spread the blanket out on the grassy mountainside. Then I laid the puzzles out and waited. After a bit, David came out to join me.

“Look what I got,” I said. I almost felt a bit like I was treating him like a child, as if we needed to go that far back in time to fix the broken pieces in order to rebuild them and make them able to work again now.

“Puzzles,” he said as he smiled and came to sit down on the blanket with me.