Chapter 35

“You saying you’re a bender?” Dad asked.

Shane’s chest cracked. He felt it, sure as if Dad had hit him with a rifle butt in the sternum, and adrenaline flooded his system in a wash of ice-cold clarity. The world sharpened.

Run.

He bolted, twisting the door handle in a sweat-slippery fist and darting out into the cold night. He heard Dad shout his name, saw the movement out of the corner of his eye, but Dad was forty-seven and Shane was scared. He was down the garden and over the fence in a panic-induced rush, and then he was bolting down the alley that ran behind the gardens and over the stile into the trees that ran up to the ridge.

Out in the open, his stride lengthened and he ran, mindless of the icy mud soaking through his socks, ignorant of the fact he had no shoes and only a thin hoodie against the grim winter night, oblivious to the effort of his body in running full-pelt uphill and with poor grip on the soaked ground.