Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 427

My father never recovered. He lived for a few more years, lived sideways, one arm useless, one leg dragging, his eyes on a middle distance where the man he had been still stood, and then he died quietly in his sleep, and I remember feeling relieved, and then hating myself for it, because he had been gone for so long already. The sticks had taken him and the stroke had finished it, and what was left had only been waiting for permission to stop.

My mother buried him, and then she sat Felix and me down and told us that hate was a poison we could not afford. The Castros had already taken enough, she said. If we let them take our hearts too, they would have won everything. It took years. It took every day of those years, every time I heard their name and felt my stomach turn, every time I had to breathe through the anger and choose to let it pass. But we did it. Felix and I let it go, and I told myself I did not care anymore, that as long as they never crossed my path I would leave the past buried where it belonged.

Then Sharon Adams stood in front of my Lab and threatened my best friend. And her father stood in the road with more than twenty men behind him. And the past came through the door again, and I was nine years old, and my mother was bleeding, and there was no one coming to help us.

The dream rolled over me a second time, the delivery room, the silent baby, the nurse's face, my mother's scream, and I think I cried out, because Dominic's voice came through the dark like a hand reaching into water.

"Celeste. Celeste. Wake up. You are dreaming. Wake up."

I opened my eyes to his face above me, panicked, his hands gripping my shoulders, and I realized my cheeks were wet. I had been crying in my sleep. My whole body was shaking like I had been running for hours.

When my breathing evened out, he laid me back against the pillows. His eyes moved over my face, reading me, and something in his expression had gone very still. Then he stood, and he walked out of the room.

I sat up after a while. I wanted to go after him, to tell him I was fine, that it was nothing, that he did not need to worry. I swung my legs off the bed and padded down the hallway, and I heard his voice, and I stopped.

His voice carried anger. It was quiet, controlled, the kind of quiet I had never heard from him, the kind that came before terrible things.