Chapter 2 - The Cold Drive Home
The phone buzzed against my leg like an angry hornet, lighting up the dark interior of our crossover every thirty seconds. My father’s name flashed across the dashboard screen first, followed immediately by my older sister, Brenda.
"Don't answer it," Evan said softly, his knuckles white on the steering wheel as the wipers scraped away a thin crust of sleet. "Claire, just leave it."
"I’m not answering," I whispered. My throat felt like raw meat. In the rearview mirror, Lily was already asleep, her tiny chest rising and falling beneath the fleece blanket with the little stitched ducks on it. Her cheeks were pink from the sudden burst of winter wind between the house and the car, but otherwise, she looked utterly untroubled. She didn't know she had just been weaponized by her own grandmother. She didn't know that fifty miles back, in a dining room smelling of glazed ham and expensive evergreen candles, her mother was being labeled an unfit, reckless failure.
"She called her head deformed," I muttered, the words burning on my tongue. "She held her up to Aunt Linda and asked if her soft spot looked sunken because I didn't drink enough whole milk while I was on bed rest."
Evan exhaled a harsh, ragged breath. "She's sick, Claire. She has spent your entire life finding the softest part of your neck and biting it. I should have stayed in the living room. If I was standing right there, she wouldn't have dared—"
"Yes, she would have," I cut in. "She would have done it louder. She wanted an audience. She waited until Brenda brought her twin boys in—the massive, ten-pound football players—just so she could put Lily next to them like an exhibit."
My phone lit up again. This time it was a text from Brenda: *Claire, you’ve completely ruined dinner. Mom is sobbing in the guest bathroom. Dad’s blood pressure is spiking. Turn the car around and stop this ridiculous tantrum.*
I stared at the screen until the backlight died, leaving my face cast in the greenish glow of the instrument panel. Tears stung my eyes, but beneath the hurt, a cold, hard resolve was solidifying. For twenty-eight years, I had apologized for things I didn't do. I had apologized for getting sick on family vacations, for choosing a state college over the private school Mom couldn't afford but wanted the bragging rights for, and for marrying an engineer who didn't come from old money.
When Lily arrived seven weeks early—an emergency C-section after three days of terrifying placental abruption—I had spent twenty-four hours weeping in an ICU bed while tubes ran into my daughter's translucent arms. Mom’s first words upon visiting the NICU hadn't been *I'm glad you both survived.* They had been: *You never could carry anything to term without rushing it.*
May you like
"We're going to my sister's place tomorrow instead," Evan said, his voice dropping into that calm, steady register he used when things fell apart. "Jenna has five pies, three kids who will worship Lily, and she will not say a single goddamn word about birth percentiles."
"We can't go anywhere," I said, leaning my forehead against the cold glass of the passenger window. "Because tomorrow morning, my mother will show up at our front door. She never lets an exit go unpunished."
