(TAYLOR’S DEMONIC ADVENTURE) CHAPTER NINETEEN

By the time they left the cemetery, Taylor felt as though she had spent the entire afternoon holding herself together with both hands.

She sat in the passenger seat with her forehead resting against the cool glass, watching Brockton Bay slide past in a blur of streets, shops, traffic lights, and people who had no idea what had happened that morning. The city looked almost offensively ordinary after the cemetery, and Taylor found herself envying everyone she passed because they were allowed to be ordinary without having to think about three coffins being lowered into the ground.

Her dad drove with both hands on the steering wheel, and neither of them said anything.

Taylor didn’t mind the silence at first. She was too tired to fill it, and she suspected her father felt much the same. The funeral had taken something out of both of them, although she couldn’t have said exactly what it was. Grief had already been there, along with guilt and anger and all the other emotions she had spent weeks trying to sort into something she could understand, but watching the coffins disappear beneath the earth had given those feelings a weight that thinking about them never could.

She closed her eyes for a moment before opening them again. Her dad was staring at the road, although there was something distant in his expression that made it clear he wasn’t really seeing the traffic ahead of them. Taylor watched him for several seconds before the realisation settled heavily in her chest.

Her father had been through this too.

She had spent most of the funeral worrying about the families of Sophia, Emma, and Madison, about what they might say if they found her, and about whether she could control herself if they blamed her for what had happened. She had thought about Jessica Yamada, the therapy she had agreed to, and the still angry part of herself that had wanted to desecrate the graves.

Somewhere along the way, she’d forgotten that her dad had been standing in that cemetery too. 

He had watched his daughter stand apart from everyone else while the parents of three dead girls grieved a few metres away.

He had watched Alan Barnes nearly attack him.

He had watched Taylor come apart.

And now he was driving her home as though none of it had happened, even though Taylor could see the exhaustion written across his face.

Taylor looked at him again. She didn’t particularly want to break the silence, and she had no idea whether she would be any good at it, but she couldn’t spend the rest of the drive pretending she hadn’t noticed how distant he seemed.

“Dad?”

He glanced towards her before returning his attention to the road. “Yeah?”

“Where are we going?”

He visibly hesitated. “I thought we’d get something to eat.”

Taylor nodded slowly at that. “Fugly Bob’s?”

“If that’s okay.”

She nodded. “Yeah.”

Another minute passed.

Taylor looked through the windscreen and tried to think of something to say.

Nothing came.

She mentally discarded several possibilities, most of which sounded either painfully forced or like something a therapist might suggest during an exercise about healthy communication. Eventually, she settled on the first thing that came to mind.

“Do you remember when you tried to convince me that Fugly Bob’s had the best burgers in Brockton Bay?”

His mouth twitched. “I didn’t try to convince you.”

“You absolutely did.”

“I said they were good.”

“You said they were the best.”

“I was younger then.”

Taylor turned towards him. “It was last year.”

“I was young.”

“You were not young.”

“I felt young.”

“That’s even worse.”

He actually smiled.

It was small, but Taylor caught it. And she felt something loosen in her chest.

“Besides,” her dad continued, “you were the one who complained about them.”

“I was right.”

“You ate the whole burger.”

“I was hungry.”

“You said it tasted like cardboard.”

“It did.”

“And then you finished the chips.”

Taylor crossed her arms with an amused huff. “I wanted to find out whether the chips were also terrible.”

He glanced at her. “And?”

“They were.”

He laughed.

It wasn’t a big laugh, and it didn’t last long, but it was enough.

Taylor smiled despite herself.

There.

That was something.

She turned her attention back towards the window, feeling slightly less helpless than she had a minute earlier.

For a while, they talked about nothing important.

Taylor spoke highly of the school cafeteria, although she admitted that she had probably become biased after spending so much time avoiding Winslow’s. Her dad agreed that Arcadia’s cafeteria was good, which led to a brief discussion about how much worse Winslow’s had been, and Taylor pointed out that whatever they served there looked like it had been excavated rather than cooked.

She told him about Dean’s habit of appearing beside her whenever he decided she needed company, which earned an amused eyebrow from her dad, and then she moved on to Victoria’s tendency to make plans on behalf of everyone around her.

“So they are your friends?”

Taylor looked down at her hands. “I suppose.”

“That’s good.”

“Victoria mostly decided I was going to be her friend, and Dean apparently decided the same thing.”

“That sounds like a good problem to have.”

“It… is.”

Her dad smiled.

Taylor continued talking, partly because she wanted to keep him talking and partly because she realised she actually enjoyed telling him about them.

Amy came up eventually, mostly because Victoria rarely seemed to go anywhere without dragging her along, and Taylor described her as the only person in the group who appeared to have any sense of self-preservation.

“I like them,” she admitted after a pause. “Even if they’re annoying.”

“That’s usually how friendships work.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

Something shifted in her dad’s expression, and Taylor immediately wished she hadn’t said it.

The conversation threatened to fall back into the awkward silence that had filled the car earlier, and Taylor found herself searching for something else to say.

“So,” she said, turning towards him, “how was your day?”

He looked at her. “You were there.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“I think it was terrible.”

Taylor nodded. “Yeah.”

“I think that’s probably the most honest answer I can give.”

She looked at him for a moment before nodding again. “Okay.”

He sighed, hands tightening around the steering wheel. “I hated seeing you standing there by yourself.”

Taylor swallowed. “I didn’t want to be near them.”

“I know.”

“They might have blamed me.”

“They might have.”

“And I didn’t think I could handle that.”

“I know.”

Taylor looked down. “I still don’t know if I could.”

Her dad was silent for a moment. “I don’t think anyone should have expected you to.” She looked at him, but he continued watching the road. He added, “You went there anyway.”

Taylor didn’t have an answer to that. “I almost didn’t.”

“But you did.”

She nodded. “I did.”

He reached over and briefly squeezed her shoulder before returning his hand to the wheel.

Taylor stared at the road ahead.

The gesture was simple, but it made her throat tighten.

She cleared it before speaking.

“I was worried about you too.”

He looked at her.

“You don’t have to worry about me.”

“I know.”

“Taylor…”

“I know.”

She gave him a small smile. “I’m still allowed to.”

For a moment, her dad said nothing.

Then he smiled.

“Yeah.”

The rest of the drive passed more easily.

When they pulled into Fugly Bob’s, Taylor was still tired, and the cemetery remained somewhere at the back of her mind, waiting for her to think about it again. She suspected it would remain there for a long time.

For now, though, she climbed out of the car with her father and followed him towards the restaurant.

The sign above the entrance looked exactly as she remembered it, and somehow that familiarity made the day feel a little less overwhelming.

Taylor held the door open for her dad. “After you.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Since when are you polite?”

“Since today.”

“Should I be worried?”

“Probably.”

He laughed again.

This time, Taylor laughed with him.

It didn’t fix anything, but she hadn’t expected it to. The girls were still dead, their families were still grieving, and Taylor still had a long road ahead of her before she could understand what had happened and what it had made of her.

Yet as she followed her father inside, she decided that maybe fixing everything wasn’t what they needed tonight. Maybe getting through dinner was enough.