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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: PROMISE LAND ( trigger warning: brief mentions of death, alcoholism and abuse )
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MAGGIE SULLIVAN HAD BEEN to a grand total of five, now six, funerals in her lifetime. That was five, now six, too many for a girl her age, but Death had followed her around even when Maggie was too young to know what Death really was. Some days, it seemed like that was all Maggie would ever be; the girl who attracted grief wherever she went.
The first funeral was for her grandmother on her father's side. Maggie knew next to nothing about the woman, just that her name was Simone Abrams, she had dirt-brown hair like her grandchildren, and that she liked making her only son's life unbearable when he was a kid. Alcoholism, emotionally abusive tendencies, a rocky marriage with a man who had grown to despise her with every drop of alcohol she consumed... if it wasn't for the fleeting presence of Maggie's father in her life at the time of Simone's death, her four-year-old granddaughter never would've considered attending her funeral. The odds were, really, that she wouldn't have even known the woman was dead...
Now Maggie wasn't proud of this. It was horrible to say let alone think, but Maggie couldn't bring herself to care if she knew or not. Simone was nothing but a stain to her ancestry, someone she'd rather forget.
The same could be said for Maggie's father, who in many ways, was just like his cold-hearted mother, despite promising his long-term girlfriend time and time again that he would change for their kids, for her, that he didn't want to be Simone Abrams incarnate.
But considering Maggie could count only three maybe four genuinely happy memories at a stretch that she had of the man, it was safe to say that Vincent Abrams only knew two things in life; how to break loosely given promises and how to let down those who wanted to love him. He was off doing God only knew what when Maggie was born – really, the only birth he was around for was Vera's, and Maggie assumed that was only because he tried (and failed) to stay sober for the very first one, the shining jewel of his growing family with the only woman to give him the time of day. The last three were just collateral to him, repetition of what he already had seen.
Then, because why would anything ever go right for the Sullivans, by the time that Maggie was five, Vincent Abrams was locked up in a prison cell that he would never get out of, for the same reasons his mother's own father got locked up, and his father before him and so on.... Abrams blood was part ichor, part liquor, part destruction for everyone who got too close.
Maggie could only hope, with her mother's last name and looks to match, that her father gave her nothing more than his DNA.
Besides, Maggie was dragged along to his funeral just a month before her mother died... So, maybe, the last man or woman with Abrams DNA to end up in prison would be him.
