Free Sample
Preview from chapter one
We lay awake for hours, bodies tangled in the narrow geometry of my mattress, sweat drying on our skin. My father’s breathing was loud in my ear, ragged but steady, the sound of a man alive and, for once, unafraid. We didn’t speak for a long time. I traced lazy spirals on his chest, drawing invisible lines through the sparse hair, letting my fingernails catch on the knots of old scar tissue. He’d told me once he got that one from a kitchen accident, but now I wondered how many of his injuries were self-inflicted, little punishments for imagined sins. He curled his arm around my waist and rested his chin on the crown of my head, as if he could fuse us together through sheer persistence.
Eventually, the silence got heavy, not with shame but with a slow, leaking sort of sadness. I could feel it bleeding out of him, the way the pressure behind his ribs crept into the space between us. My own thoughts, sharp and mean before, softened in the hush of his breathing. The shape of his body was familiar, but everything else about him was new. I could not stop wanting to know more.
“Can I ask you something?” My voice was soft, but the words cut him anyway. His whole body tensed, then relaxed, a silent rehearsal for confession.
“Anything,” he said. The word barely made it past his lips. He closed his eyes, like he already knew where this was going.
I propped myself up on one elbow and looked at him, not the man who raised me but the man who had just said yes to my every need, my every boundary. “Were you ever happy with her?” I asked. “My mother, I mean. Was it ever real for you?”
A hard swallow. He didn’t open his eyes. “It was real at first,” he said, and his voice came out smaller than I’d expected, a child’s voice inside a man’s ruined chest. “She was the first person who ever… wanted me, I guess. At least, I thought she did. I needed to believe she did.” He wet his lips, eyes still locked shut. “But she never liked sex. Not with me. Not with anyone, I think. She told me that after you were born, she only did it because it was expected. She stopped wanting kids the moment you arrived.” The words spilled out in a rush, as if they’d been waiting for a crack in the dam. “I wanted more. I wanted a big family, noisy and chaotic, but she just… shut down. After that, every touch was a negotiation. Every hug, every…” He broke off and pressed his palm to his forehead, rubbing at the crease that always got deeper when he was close to breaking.