I realized none of this made sense without context. Okay, we were about to go down the rabbit hole, and it was gonna get messy. I grabbed the bottle of vodka and took a full-mouthed swig, then slid the bottle across the table at him. “You’ll need this.”

He lifted the bottle and gulped.

“It’s a long, complicated story…and I hope you’ll forgive me after you hear the whole thing. I promise you Bennett is not a threat to Vera. But if he isn’t already dead, he will be soon.”

Chapter 37

Chapter 37

Marin

Fifteen years ago…

I had scrubbed and scoured, ruining my Mary J. Blige T-shirt with bleach stains trying to wash the blood residue out of the bathtub. Chunks of afterbirth and placenta collected near the drain, almost making me vomit as I scooped them up in a paper towel and flushed them. Only after the fact did I pray I didn’t clog the pipes. A faint ring of red still circled the ceramic basin, but my muscles were too tired to keep cleaning.

A lingering excitement mixed with relief still pulsed through my body after a long afternoon helping Mom deliver the baby at home in this very tub. Mom didn’t trust doctors, and Dad didn’t like hospital bills. After hours of labor, all that mattered were those final moments—a body-shuddering animalistic scream as Mom stood under the running shower, Dad circling his arms around her while water coursed over them, me like a major-league catcher with arms and hands splayed, ready for my new sibling to fall into them. I relived the slippery baby dropping into my arms, the full-throated wail, my big exhale, Mom crumbling into the corner of the tub with exhaustion...I would never forget this moment. A little sister. So perfect. I had high hopes for her. She’d get Mom clean. Repair our family. Our love for her would fix all wounds.

It was halfway through the season finale of Gilmore Girls when I noticed the time. Mom and Dad should have been home by now. They were only supposed to take Mom and the baby—they hadn’t named her yet, but I liked the name Jasmine—to the hospital to get checked out, but it had been over two hours and still they weren’t home.

A normal kid in a normal family wouldn’t have worried. Parents two hours late? No big deal. But I wasn’t a normal kid and I didn’t have a normal family. I spent my life being conditioned into a state of perpetual fear. And it all circled around Mom.

It wasn’t Mom I was afraid of. She’d never laid a hand on me. It was being alone—particularly being alone with her—that terrified me. Not like there was much of a difference between the two.