It's spring solstice.

I thought for fucking sure she'd be back today.

Donnie's losing what's left of his cracked-up mind.

Eve wrote about him in her journals... a lot. I knew he could get ferocious, but I never seen it for myself. It took Chet and Brady and a whole lot of Eve's moonshine to keep him from charging off to nowhere. Six shots in and he still managed to punch a tree. I don't think he cares who he beats at this point, so long as he gets his hands around some poor fucker's neck.

Those two are like fire and ice when they're together, and you never know which one's going to be which. She says she don't love him anymore, not like that. But... I don't think someone like her could just turn off emotions that ran that deep for that long. Not for the guy she still says is the love of her life.

For ten whole years, they were never out of each other's sight for more than 24 hours or so. Well, except when they were in jail, but even then, they figured out the guys' pod was right above the girls' pod, and they'd yell messages to each other through the toilet plumbing. I swear that shit is true. How do you even figure something like that out? But they did.

Still, ten years. That's more than half my whole life.

I asked her once why he was the way he is.

After all that time together, and as smart as she is, Eve said she still didn't know for sure.

From what I can gather from her journals, he was one fry short of a Happy Meal when she met him, and she knew it. He'd barely say a word to anyone and he was constantly working on some chore or another around the Donkey-place property. It didn't take long before he was living in Eve's 5th wheel, and he worked his ass off so R.J. would let them keep it there.

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

I guess he has mad skills. He's a hell of a cook, I'll give him that. But to hear Eve tell it, he can do everything from sales to tile to fencing to fixing wells to restoring furniture. Hell, I guess he and her dad built this place from the ground up.

And he can fight. He's like Ninja good at fighting. You wouldn't think it to look at him. He's lanky, like a swimmer. But I've seen him sparring with some of the guys -- the big ones, not the runts. He can bring them to their knees just by squeezing their fingers in the right place. 'Pressure points,' he calls them.

And he's crazy fast. Like a cat.

But sometimes he comes out with stuff that just makes no sense. Things everyone knows isn't real. In the beginning, Eve thought it was the meth that made him that way. 'Meth-induced psychosis,' I think she called it. But when he started seeing things and hearing voices, she was pretty sure he was schizophrenic and probably always has been. The meth just turned it up to eleven.

He's like her, an empath, but she'd write about how it was almost like he could manipulate energy and make things move. And he knew stuff. Not quite a psychic, but close.

If he'd had a better life, Eve wrote one time, maybe he'd have been able to handle the gifts he had, but I guess he had a pretty fucked-up home. Lots of drugs, lots of abuse, and lots of crazy. He never knew what normal was til he met her, and it sounds like he didn't know what the fuck to do with it once he had it.

At some point, it was like sensory-overload, and he just shorted out, like a hot wire wasn't connecting right in his head or something.

But it didn't matter how crazy he got or what he was doing, they had some weird connection that didn't get broken even after she threw him out. She had too. He was getting violent and he was lying to her.

She'd show Jesus Christ himself the door if he lied to her even once. With Donnie... well she wrote that if she didn't let him go, she'd lose her own mind.

But Eve said she still always knew when he was in trouble. She could feel it. She described it like that connection that twins have, where they suddenly know the other one died halfway across the country or something. She said she's only had that kind of connection with a couple of people her whole life.

Two days before he showed back up, she wrote in her journal that she wished she could shut it the fuck off. She hadn't seen him in over a year, but she knew it was only a matter of time.

Now, that thing's got her, and he's babbling on about bank accounts and kabillions of dollars and James Bond computer shit no one can even follow let alone make sense out of.

It's the exact same kind of bullshit Eve described not long after they first met. And it's why she doesn't let him get near an iPad or a smartphone. Apparently, if he gets his hands on one, he'll play on it until it either runs out of juice or he gets into the operating system and fucks it up.

Fuck. I really thought she'd be back today...

--L.M.