The Girl in the Mirror (Sand & Fog #3)

The Girl in the Mirror

Sand & Fog Series
Book 3

Susan Ward

Copyright © 2016 Susan Ward

All Rights Reserved.

All Rights Reserved.
In Accordance with the US Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher or author constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property.

This is a work of fiction
. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Warning:
The Girl in the Mirror has strong sexual themes and violence, which could trigger emotional distress. This story is NOT for everyone.

The Girl in the Mirror
is the third standalone book in the Sand & Fog series. This book has a HEA.

I don’t know why what happened to me shocks people. Everything about me is perfectly logical. Down to my three obsessions: ballet, sex, and food. Yep, food, though it might seem strange to put that one on that list, but it isn’t, not really.

All three bring me pleasure and pain.

All three demand the same commitment from me. Total discipline and control coupled with an ability to let completely loose and surrender to reward through agony and beauty through sacrifice.

See, completely logical.

Until it wasn’t and sent me into a downward spiral that seemed out of nowhere to everyone in my life except Jacob Merrick.

He saw through me from the start.

But that didn’t stop me from going to bed with him.

What I didn’t expect was for Jacob to become the guy who saved me from myself.

The Girl in the Mirror
is an intense coming-of-age romance about addiction and love, sacrifice and mistakes with a poignant and unpredictable happily ever after.

The game we all play is the same. It’s a simple war we fight every day: what we allow ourselves to see and remember.

How we balance our scale.

More good or more bad.

The things we give importance to and the things we let be. In truth, all our scales, regardless of what we’ve done with our lives, are equal. They are equal at our birth and equal at our death, and not a single act between the two changes any of it. We live, we die, we love, and we lose. And everything else doesn’t matter. In the giant scheme of things no person is greater than any other, and our only purpose is to love, and if we miss that we are nothing.
~ Jackson Parker

“Krystal”

I don’t look like my mother or my father. Somehow through the random magic of gene selection I ended up looking like neither of my parents. I have dark hair, but it isn’t inky black like my dad’s or golden blond like my mom’s. My eyes resolved on their own to be gray instead of blue, though everyone likes to say they’re blue when they are really not because that’s a celebrated Parker trait from my mom’s side of the family. I’m neither tall like my father nor short like my mother. I come in at a nondescript five feet six inches.

My personality—now, that’s another story. The result of random gene selection, too, no doubt. Or perhaps I should say God’s wicked sense of humor. Or maybe just cosmic unfairness. You see, somehow I ended up with all the strengths
and
flaws of both my parents, a perfect hybrid of the best and the worst of Chrissie and Alan. It’s an overwhelming burden to be gifted with it all, and if the word equality had been invented for any situation it was this: the equitable distribution of your parents’ defects.

It would have been fair if the flaws had been equally doled out among all five of us kids, and if my brothers and sisters had gotten their fair share of the family legacy.

But that’s not how life works. At least not for me. And it hasn’t been really bad. Not really. At least I didn’t think so until
that
day.

Nope, not going there, to that part of my story, not yet. We don’t know each other well enough. You’re still like everyone else I meet: you think you know me because you think you know Chrissie and Alan. And you would be wrong.

You don’t know any of us. Not really. Fuck, I’m their daughter and I don’t really know them. My entire theory could be completely wrong. It is predicated on the notion that I know and understand my parents, and that somehow provides meaningful insight about me.

Really, isn’t that what we all think? Ground zero of who we are, for better or worse, is our parents. When we look in the mirror, we don’t really see ourselves, but a fast shifting, morphing figure—you know, like the opening credits on
Roseanne
or something. Fat to thin, pale to tan, features heavy to plastic-surgery perfect with lift—only it’s not me I see morphing in the mirror, it’s them blurred like a meme shading me out of the reflection.

OK, are you following? Crap, haven’t any of you ever felt this way? Fine, allusion too vague and I know that TV show is from back in the day. Go look it up if you’re not following me here. Shit, am I the only one who watches entirely too many late-night reruns?

Well, I didn’t used to pass my nights watching the flat screen. I was famous once. A famous ballerina. Unfortunately, with too much name and not enough talent. That was the recipe for my downfall, the
not enough talent
part. Don’t get me wrong, I was a good dancer, just not gifted. I knew it and so did everyone else—except for perhaps my parents—and I went farther in the dancing world than I should have thanks to my pedigree. I suppose I should be grateful, but right now it’s freaking hard to feel grateful about anything—oh no, rewind, I’m not going to tell you
that
part yet.

Someone once told me that extraordinary people are doomed to live stupid lives. They weren’t talking about me. They were talking about my parents, trying to tie up the convoluted history of Chrissie and Alan into a neat, nice, simple theory in a way they thought a ten-year-old child would get.

Yep, I asked questions like that at ten.
How could my parents screw up everything so completely for so many years when it’s obvious they have always loved each other?

And the answer I got back:
Extraordinary people are doomed to live stupid lives.

It was probably a mistake to pose that question to Linda Rowan, but my options were decidedly few. As far back as I can remember my mom has only had two friends—Rene Thompson, who we rarely ever see, and Linda Rowan, who I probably shouldn’t count because she’s sort of quasi-family and one doesn’t count their relatives as friends. Do they?

Wait—are you telling me you didn’t notice this about my mother? The fact that she has hardly any friends. It’s meaningful and significant. It’s all part of the theory—
extraordinary people are doomed to live stupid lives.
Trust me, it is.

What? Oh crap. You don’t know anything about my parents—Chrissie Parker and Alan Manzone. How is that possible? Do you live in a cave or something? Fine. The abridged version in under thirty seconds.

Let’s start with their similar backgrounds. Both my parents are famous musicians, musical geniuses. My mom is a singer-songwriter and my dad a world famous guitarist and the iconic lead singer of the hard rock band Blackpoll. They were both famous the second they took their first breath of air on this earth. Both rich. Both extraordinary.

My mom’s dad is Jackson Parker. Yep, that’s him. The guy they call the voice of a generation because of his music and activism in the ’60s. My dad is the fourth generation of a renowned British theatrical family. Yep, Dad started out in the theater. Made some pretty good films, too. Enough that he won an Oscar at eight—wait, forget that part. We don’t talk about that history because he didn’t like the film industry, or maybe it was Grandma Lillian, so he ditched his family, ditched his name, became a world famous rocker, and the rest is pretty much history.

How they met, that part of their story, is rather simple. They met at Grandpa Jack’s, though nothing really kicked up that first night together in Santa Barbara. It all happened later when Mom went to New York City for her Juilliard audition and instead hooked up with
fresh out of rehab
Pop. If the stories in the tabloids are to be believed, they had quite a hot and heavy thing going for three weeks before Grandpa Jack dragged Mom home to California.

Now here’s the part that will make your head spin. It makes mine spin. Somehow they remained together and in love, without being really together, for over twenty years. They both married twice before they married each other. Dad’s wives were luckier than Mom’s husbands. Both her husbands died. We should probably give Pop props for being willing to be Chrissie’s third trip to the altar.

This is the part people go crazy over. Us kids. Somehow there are five of us, and four of us didn’t know we were Alan’s kids until after they finally married. Yep, I know. You want a pretty, wrap it in a ribbon, tie it in a bow kind of explanation for that, but hell, I don’t have one. I’m just the daughter, remember?

And I’ve got my own shit I’m still working through even though it’s been twelve years since that landmark moment when I found out I wasn’t Jesse Harris’s daughter—husband number two for Chrissie. I thought I’d help you out here in case you were having trouble following—and that my biological dad is Alan Manzone.

I know it sounds extreme, our version of the modern family, and you are probably there thinking it’s gotten me pretty messed up. You know, that part about me thinking Jesse was my dad until the age of nine and finding out my real dad was someone else.

It wasn’t really like that. We sort of morphed into a pretty good thing. One family, five kids, two superstar careers, and happily ever after the Chrissie and Alan way. And I love my parents. They are extraordinary people. Flawed and human like all of us, and I truly admire their willingness to stick it out, keep slugging, to finally get things right when everything was always so chaotic between them.

But I won’t lie. I still wonder—though I’ve never dared to ask my mom—how could you have five kids with Alan without being with him? Did you time it? Is it a cosmic joke? And the most important question—no, I’ve never dared to ask either of my parents this—how could two people who love each other so much mess up so much for so many years?

Of all the questions I have, that’s the one, if I had to pick only one, that I would want the answer to. Linda Rowan’s answer really didn’t do it for me—
extraordinary people are doomed to live stupid lives.

Now that I’m twenty-one, I wonder why the hell someone would say such a thing to a child, even a woman as odd as Linda. It would piss me off, the idiocy of the explanation, except it was probably the most prophetic thing anyone ever said to me. And with my current predicament, it’s becoming a handy slogan.