There are moments in which Violet can't stand to look at him. She can't stand the inkiness of his black eyes, the gold in his hair, the way he still seems to lose weight even after death, how his cheeks get more and more hollow. These moments, her heart swells with so much hatred, for him and for herself, that she can barely breathe, and when he touches her her skin crawls underneath his hand, leaving goosebumps on her pale skin.

She doesn't want to look at him when she whispers "Go away," but she forces herself to, forces herself to see the stark hurt in his dark eyes, the hesitation in his touch, his fingers barely brushing her skin, hovering over her. He isn't sure if she is serious. He thinks she is testing him.

She had told him to never go away again, even if she asked, and boy, did she regret it. Tate took everything she said literally, never forgot a single word that passed her lips. She couldn't wish him away, so she'd sigh and disappear.

Only for a few moments, never longer than a couple of hours, because she'd begin to feel him stalking the house, lurking in the basement. She could feel the cold rush of him all over her body, feel the darkness in him rising, erasing everything good and loveable in him. If she took longer than an hour, she'd find Tate stalking Travis, watching every move he made, and it made Violet hate him all the more.

As if she'd leave him for Travis, as if another man could be even a fraction of the reason she began to hate him, began to pull away. It was just another way for Tate to forget all the awful things he'd done to her, to her family, to pretend it was Travis and not his own choices, his own evil, that made her need space.

Sometimes when she'd go away, she'd find him sitting at the gazebo, near the spot where she'd woken up with his finger bruises on her neck. She'd find him sitting with his head in his hands, the sunlight making his golden curls a halo on his head, and she'd begin to love him again.

If she went away too long he would stay awake for days, watching her sleep, and his very presence irritated her, the way he hovered over her as if she were a child.

She wondered how she could live this way, how she could spend the rest of eternity loving him and hating him, wanting him close and wanting him gone. She wanted to forgive him, to feel the same way she had when he had woken up, bloody and confused in her arms like a newborn. For years, it had been like that, them spending days in bed making love and talking about nothing, but slowly, the hatred had crept back into her heart, and she thought maybe it was because nothing inside of Tate had really changed.

She felt the darkness in him, the coldness, when he watched Travis play with those little girls, felt all the awful things he wanted to do to him for so much as touching her all those years ago.

She wondered if there was any light in him at all, or if had all been her projection of what she thought he should be, of the boy she thought she had known. She loved that boy still, but every glimpse she had of that darkness made her question him, made her question herself.

What did it mean that she couldn't make herself leave for good, that she saw the darkness rising and rising in him every day and she still couldn't bear the thought of not having him.

Maybe she was just as dark as he was. Maybe her light was fading in this hellish place. Every moment his black eyes were on her she felt colder and colder.

Just when she thought she might cut her own throat just to feel the warmth of her dead blood flowing, a new family moved into the house, and everything changed.