LILY HELD HER HAND under the bathtub faucet, the water so hot, it felt like punishment. She unwrapped her summer dress and hung it on the towel hook.

Lily had always had a nice body. She didn’t stumble into it; she worked for it every day of her life. She could still throw up on demand, even though she hadn’t done so in over a decade. Not since Rose caught her and gave her such a tongue-lashing, it wasn’t just Lily’s throat that burned. It had been hard to adjust to swallowing being permanent. She saw food and thought instantly about what it would become inside her. The whole thing was disgusting. But then she had children and, for the first time, she saw her body itself as powerful. Before that, she believed her body’s only power was in the currency its shape gave her, which made her worth something to the strong. It wasn’t until she brought her children into the world through nothing but her body’s force that she realized she could be strong herself.

She looked in the foggy mirror, grateful for the kindness of blurred edges. It had been a long time since she gave birth, and her sense of strength waned the older her kids got, the less they needed from her. She placed one palm on her belly and pushed, before sliding into the steam of the old bathtub and thinking, once more, of Sarah.

—

PHILIP WAS SENTENCED TO fifteen years for killing Sarah Kelly. It wasn’t quite manslaughter, but it wasn’t cold-blooded murder either. A crime of passion, they called it. A mistake without the innocent glow of good intentions. The bruising on her chest strengthened the prosecution’s case, but her history of handjobs in the local cemetery after school weakened it. They said she liked it rough.

After the trial, Philip lasted three weeks before he hanged himself with his bedsheets. No note, no nothing.

Everyone thought he couldn’t handle the guilt, or the punishment. Silas swore up and down that there was foul play, threatening everyone from the attorneys to the police to the COs who found him. He went to the trial only once. He couldn’t stand sitting there silently, watching his brother’s hunched shoulders in the front row as person after person talked about his temper, his wild side, the way he could knock a tight end flat on his back without staggering. When they talked about the day a neighbor’s dog went missing and they found his collar inside the saddlebag of Philip’s motorcycle, flecks of blood morphing the name from “Otis” to “Is,” Silas lost it. He jumped to his feet and screamed, “Bullshit!” until a bailiff dragged him out.