The Yellow Wood

Alexander waits in his yellow-gray house in a yellow wood for his namesake daughter, the one who "of all my children ... has always stirred me most, with love, with rage and fear, with envy and disappointment." He has summoned her. She is his prodigal child, and she is his scion, and it's time.

Alexandra left as soon as she turned eighteen, the only way she could keep from being swallowed up by her father, her only chance of having a life of her own. Alexandra grew up with her father's voice in her head, his will on her in one form or another. Now, though she vowed she never would, she is going back. Because his voice came into her head, ordering her home.

The longer Alexandra stays with her father in her childhood home, the stronger her suspicions that his control over her is more insidious than she knew. Her siblings are all oddly under his control, exactly what he made them, and she discovers evidence of what he has planned for her.

"She fled to live her own life," Alexander observes. "As if there ever were such a thing."