Free Sample
Preview from chapter one
When it was Kila’s voice and not my wife’s that passed judgment on my work, something in my chest twisted, flickering between humiliation and the wild small hope that I’d done well enough to make her proud. Those two impulses were now the double helix of my life, entwined until I could no longer name which was the disease and which the cure.
Kila prowled the kitchen with her phone raised like a grading clipboard, reviewing every tile edge and sprayed-down surface. She dug fingernails under the drawer pulls. She peeled a knife from the drying rack and held it against the window’s last daylight, like a jeweler appraising a flawed diamond. She shook her head in practiced disappointment. “You see this, Mom?” she called, tapping the blade with her thumbnail and making me keenly aware of each water spot I’d missed. “You see the streaking here?”
My wife, who never once in twenty years had looked at my work through any lens sharper than gratitude, heaved a sigh made entirely of sorrow and let her hands drop to her lap. “I do,” she said. The words were heavy and thin as onion skin.
Kila slammed the knife to the counter and rounded on me. “Try again tomorrow, Daddy,” she said, the pet name no longer affectionate but lacquered in acid. “And if you fail again, I’ll take away whatever you have left to lose.” Her eyes glinted with predatory joy as she half-turned to my wife. “Let’s call this Strike One.”
“Thank you, Kila,” Bryn said in a voice so low I could barely hear it. A tired, nervous habit had her twisting her wedding ring as if it was a puzzle she could solve by brute force. “Do I have your permission to go up early?” She clearly intended it as a joke, but it withered on landing.
Kila grinned, savage and toothsome. “You have my blessing, Mom. I’ll be up later to review his schedule for tomorrow.”
My wife stood, not looking at me. I watched her walk up the stairs, the tight-formal posture of her back hiding whatever she felt. When Kila finally left me alone, I gathered the phone and the cleaning implements in a daze, gravitating to the room where failure was my only companion.
I lay on the living room floor, staring at the white slug of moonlight on the ceiling, unable to move. I hadn’t yet been told whether the day’s punishment was over, so I waited, as Kila had trained me to do. Sometimes I thought she had rewired me at a biological level, replaced my old instincts with the jittery, eager mutation of servitude and the thirst for approval. If that was true, it didn’t matter how much I hated it. Your chromosomes don’t ask permission.