For just a moment, as I tried to puzzle through the indecipherable tangle of sentences that dangled from her tongue, I thought she might cry. Her eyes were damp. Sad.

But then her gaze went hard and her jaw clenched in anger. “I drank half a bottle of vodka the day I got the call. My daughter had been declared unfit for reproduction. They’d already snipped your tubes and tied neat little knots in our future by the time they bothered to tell me. Over a runny nose and flat feet! There was nothing I could do.”

My head spun. I backed away from her until my calves hit the couch, and then I sat, because the alternative was to collapse on the floor.

I’d wanted my mother that day like I’d never wanted her before or since. When I woke up in my infirmary bed, near the end of the line of girls all waking to the same devastating realization, I’d wanted my mother to hold me. To hug me and tell me that everything would be okay. That they could come at me with scalpels and sutures and sever my bloodline along with my fallopian tubes, but they could never cut out my thoughts, and they could only kill my dreams if I let them.

I still had worth. I still had hope. My future was whatever I wanted to make of it.

That was what the other mothers said to their newly sterile fifteen-year-old daughters. I could hear them. But the chair by my bed held only my little sister, her eyes as wide as saucers and as wet as the ocean. She was as scared as I was angry, and together we could only cry.

“You ruined everything for us that day,” my mother spat. “I planned for you, and I saved for you, and I carried you so carefully. You and your descendants would have been my future—a long line of made-to-order hosts. A genetic gift to myself. My legacy. Instead, you got yourself sterilized, ruining decades of planning, and your sister, whose value depended entirely on youth and purity, got herself knocked up. You’re a perfect pair, the two of you—beautiful and largely worthless. An exquisite catastrophe.”

I couldn’t make any sense of that last bit, because the first part kept playing in my head.

You ruined everything for us that day.

Had I? Had my sterilization been the trigger for our mother’s descent into depression and neglect? And madness, evidently? Was I the reason she’d stopped even trying to be a parent?

My hands were damp with nervous sweat, so I wiped them on my jeans, but I couldn’t do anything about the ache deep in my chest.

“Nina?” Melanie said, and I looked up to find her standing in the middle of the living room in jeans and a dark blue shirt, staring past me at our mother, who now clutched her car keys in her burned right hand. “What is she saying?”