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the release of my new graphic novel,” she persisted. “The Fade Shadowseeker series. The fourth installment. It’s doing well. It’s a pretty big deal, this event. I was wondering if…” She clenched her hands around the paper. Let him turn her down flat, right to her face. “Wondering if you and Ronnie might come,” she finished breathlessly.
    Her father’s eyelids quivered. “Fade Shadowseeker?” he said. “That would be the character based upon that that horrible event that blighted your whole childhood?”
    Edie cupped her hands around her wineglass and stared at the liquid trembling in the glass. “I wouldn’t say it blighted my childhood,” she said quietly. “But yes, that’s the one.”
    â€œI’m sorry to hurt your feelings, but I disagree with you about that. And I find it ironic that you would actually suggest that I come and… celebrate this unhealthy obsession of yours. Or that you suggest I let your thirteen-year-old sister witness it! What are you thinking, Edith? To ask me that? It’s an offense!”
    Edie felt her cheeks start to burn. “No. It’s not like that, Dad.”
    â€œI understood working out your feelings about that experience through drawing, and I applaud the attempt, but this has gone so far beyond a therapeutic tool, it’s…it’s—”
    â€œIt’s a fictional character, Dad,” she said, her voice gentle and flat.
    There was a strained silence as they both groped for a way out of this danger zone. Dad was half right, as far as it went. The event that had inspired Fade Shadowseeker had indeed been traumatic.
    She remembered every detail. It happened eighteen years ago, on her eleventh birthday. Her mother had arranged a big party at the country club. Edie had been dreading the party. Her hair had been curled into a million dumb ringlets. She’d been dressed in a ruffly white thing with a scratchy lace collar. A wreath of white roses, baby’s breath and lacy fluff in her hair. They’d stopped at Daddy’s Flaxon office, so that Daddy could kiss her and give her his present in person, because he couldn’t make the party. He’d bought her a pink bicycle. Pink silk ribbon bows on it. Pink helium balloons tied to the handlebars.
    A man had burst in, and run into Daddy’s office before anyone could stop him. He’d been hideously injured. His face blistered with burns, his hair singed off. His hands were black and swollen, his body bloody, covered with oozing cuts. He’d been raving about torture. Mind-rape. Kids thrown in a hole. Begging for someone to make it stop.
    Her mother screamed for security, yelling that the man was trying to kill Daddy. They had come running. The enormous, shattering crash as the wounded man threw one of the security guards through the plate glass window and out onto the grounds still echoed in her head.
    More security came running. The fight went on for a long time. The man was incredibly strong. It was terrible to hear, though she couldn’t see most of it. Mother screamed through the whole thing.
    They’d finally subdued him. It took five of them to pull him out of Daddy’s office. His eyes had fixed on her as they dragged him past, still twisting and struggling. His eyes were bright green. They shone with a brilliant, desperate light, as if lit from within. She saw it in her dreams.
    He’d twisted and strained to keep his eyes on her as they carried him away. He’d called out to her for help. His stark desperation haunted her. It haunted her still, eighteen years later.
    She tried to grasp that fey light whenever she drew Fade Shadowseeker, the scarred hero of her graphic novel series. She never came remotely close. But she kept on trying. Obsessively.
    After they hustled him away, she’d looked down at her ruffly dress. It had been speckled with a fine spray of tiny bloodstains.
    Yes, that