Chapter 2
Saint
Six Years Ago
Three clicks. A pause. The low hum of the mechanism slides into place, a sound I know better than my own name.
“Stand.”
I’m already moving before the command finishes.
Not because I want to obey him. Because I learned long ago what happens when I don’t.
And in this room with four white padded walls buried in the sub-levels of Kenyan University, there are no corners.
No shadows to disappear into. No edges to press yourself against and pretend you’re somewhere else.
That’s the point. To keep someone like me contained.
Controlled.
Invisible.
He thinks it’s working.
My stepfather settles into the steel chair on his side of the acrylic partition. His voice comes through the speaker slightly distorted, slightly diminished. I’ve always thought the glass does him a favor.
“You’ve been quiet today. Can’t sleep?”
I take a few steps forward and say nothing. I think about his throat. I think about my hands. I think about my mother, who once told me that some silences aren’t empty. They’re full of things that would destroy everything if spoken.
“I asked you a question.”
“I have nothing to say.”
I have plenty. But saying it requires being near him first, and I’m not near him yet. That day is coming. I can feel it like the next wave of rage when he is near. But I’m patient in the ways that matter.
He leans forward, legs spread, the posture of a man performing confidence for himself as much as for me. “Those eyes of yours are doing plenty of talking. Tell me what you remember?”
My jaw tightens. I give him nothing.
It’s not the first time he’s asked. He loves this. He loves watching me revisit the memory, using it like a scalpel to keep the wound fresh. His version of therapy. I doubt Dr. Wick records it faithfully.
He holds up my mother’s bracelet.
The gold is dull now, but I remember it alive on her wrist, warm from her skin, catching sunlight whenever she reached for me. I remember the tiny sound it made when she brushed my hair from my forehead. A soft, delicate chiming that used to mean I was safe.
My hand moves before I can stop it.
Not far. Not enough for him to call it weakness. Just a twitch of my fingers toward the glass, toward something that hasn’t belonged to me since the night she stopped breathing.
I close my fist so hard my nails cut into my palm.
I stare straight ahead.
“Tell me what you remember.” Slower. Harder.
The light flickers overhead, and that’s all it takes. The white splits open like a seam, and I’m no longer on the fourth floor.
The air shifts. Humidity clings to my skin. The house by the lake. Curtains drawn too tight. The smell of metal underneath perfume.
My hands curl at my sides.
“Look at her,” he says, but now he’s behind me.
My mother stands in the center of the room, laughing. Free. Unguarded. The most beautiful sound I know.
For some people, beauty is what kills them. I didn’t understand that at ten years old. I understand it now.
“She betrayed us,” he murmurs in my ear. “She embarrassed me. She failed by having you. Keeping you a secret. Your existence was an abomination.”
Something moves behind her. I feel it before I see it.
The shadow.
The blade.
“Watch.”
She turns. He is there, the shadow in the corner of a dream just before it becomes a nightmare. The knife opens her throat in one clean motion.
The blood flows like a dam breaking.
It’s sudden, absolute, and impossible to stop.
I run for her.
The ringing in my ears drowns everything.
My screams.
The sound of her body hitting the wood floor.
I reach her, but she’s already gone. The light already out of her eyes.
My stepfather grabs me by the hair and hauls me back. “You’ll always pay for her sins, Saint. Your father doesn’t want you. I don’t want you. You are nothing but the proof of what she was – a whore that kept secrets .”
Rage blinds my vision and all I can see is red.
The memory dissolves.
I’m back in the white room with the acrylic glass and the piece of shit on the other side of it, watching my face for a crack.
I smile.
“You know,” I say, very calmly, “you’re incredibly brave behind that glass. Why don’t you come in here, and I’ll tell you everything I remember.”
The color drains from his face.
That’s his curse.
We both know he’s afraid of the thing he hates the most.
Me.