Chapter 1: The Decision Made

I sat in a leather chair that cost more than most people made in a month, surrounded by the silence that always seemed so pervasive. That top-floor penthouse was too big for one person, but my late husband Harrison had liked it that way. He liked the space, the echo, and the way his footsteps announced him before he entered a room. Having been dead these past six months, his footsteps had ceased, but the silent space remained.

On the glass table in front of me lay a plain, unmarked manila folder. Inside were forty-seven typed pages and one photograph, for which I paid over thirty-thousand dollars to obtain. I had barely slept in the two days since it had reached me by courier. I reached again for my wine, and again found the glass empty, so I ignored it. My hands were steady. They were always steady.

I flipped open the folder.

The photo was right there on top. I had stared at it at dozens of times already, and I was about to stare at it again. The investigators charged me extra to get this shot of her. Fucking leeches. It was worth it, though.

The woman in the picture had turned eighteen late last year. She had auburn hair that caught the light like copper wire, and skin that freckled in the sun. She was standing in front of a trailer, arms at her sides, wearing cutoff denim shorts and a short white tank top that had gone gray from washing. She wasn’t wearing a bra, so I could see the shape of her small, dark nipples through the fabric. Above the frayed shorts, her cute little innie belly button was waiting. God, she was so fucking beautiful ... pretty in a way that made her surroundings look obscene, like a diamond that had been dropped down a sewer.

Her name was Amelia Lynn Dougherty, and she lived in the rundown trailer park called Pine Bluff Estates outside Little Rock, Arkansas. She’d already graduated high school, and worked part-time just down the road as a grocery store cashier. The investigators didn’t find she had any hobbies, but she read books on her breaks or between customers. There was no boyfriend, and no real friends to speak of. Her adoptive parents drank a lot, fought a lot, and for the most part ignored her. All of this was in the report, which I’d read multiple times.

There were also things I knew about Amelia that weren’t in the report.

She was my daughter.

She was also my sister.

I touched the photograph with one finger, tracing the line of her jaw. My finger began to tremble, so I pulled it back and made a fist until the trembling stopped.

Memories flooded back, of when I was thirteen years old. When my father, nearly blackout drunk, had decided one night that I was old enough. I did not think about that night in terms of memory. I thought about it in terms of biology. The sperm entering the egg. The cells dividing. The thing growing inside me that was both my child and my half sibling, sharing my blood and his, a knot of genetics that should never have been tied.

I was living in Texas, and in Texas, even incest was not reason enough to end a pregnancy. I was thirteen, pregnant by my own father, and the law said I had to carry her to term. I was a child being forced to have a child, and no one cared. I was barely fourteen by the time I gave birth, my body barely ready, my hips too narrow, the labor lasting thirty hours that I remembered mostly in flashes of red pain accompanied by my screams.

The state took her away as soon as her cord was cut. I screamed until my throat was raw. They told me it was for the best, that I was too young. They told me she would be sure to go to a good home. I was inconsolable for months, feeling that the most precious thing in the universe had been ripped away from me.