Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 426

My father fought his way up. He got his feet under him somehow, bleeding from a dozen places, and he lurched toward my mother, and he fell again, and that was the fall that took half his body. The stroke found him there on the floor of our ruined house, and when they finally lifted him up, the left side of his face had gone slack and his arm hung like something that did not belong to him.

Castro stood over them. He stood over my mother and my father, and he said the words I have never been able to unhear, the words that live in the space behind my ribs to this day. "Before me, you are all nothing. If I wanted, I could kill every one of you and nothing would happen to me, because I have money and you have nothing."

It was the same money that used to belong to my father.

His whole family watched, smiling.

Then help came. The neighbors Felix had roused, the police, someone, everyone, and my mother and father were rushed to the hospital, and we followed.

They would not let me stay in my mother's hospital room. Felix and I were left in our father's hospital room, where he lay unable to walk, unable to speak half his words, his eyes fixed on the ceiling like he was counting the hours he had left. I heard a nurse saying my mother was about to give birth.

I thought of the day before, when I had asked my mother when I would finally see my baby sister. She had let me rub her belly and I had felt the little kicks against my palm, and she had laughed and told me one more month, just one more month.

I had already prepared her gifts. A yellow blanket. A stuffed rabbit with floppy ears. I had hidden them under my bed and I had imagined her face, imagined her small hands, imagined the way she would smell.

My mother fought for justice afterward. She filed reports and hired lawyers and sat in courtrooms, and one by one the doors closed in her face, because the system fails people like us when the people across from them have money and names, and Castro had both, and we had neither.

He came to our house one more time, Sharon on his hip, and he laughed and told my mother this was only the beginning, and then he left, and my mother stood at the window with her hands in her pockets and said nothing.

Then Castro's wife, Annabelle died. In childbirth, with twin sons who never took a breath, and I watched my mother's face when she heard, watched something move behind her eyes, and she said it was nature's way of delivering justice, and I believed her. I believed karma had finally reached out and put its hand on that family, and I carried that belief in my chest for years like a talisman.