“He should’a been your real daddy. Not those men that came by. No. Not them.” Pearl’s head shook in slow denial and Evelyn frowned. “Them’s men was evil. They’s come and take everything we had.
Took your daddy. Took our stuff. Even took me and left me near for dead.”
Evelyn’s lips parted as she tried to voice her question in the most delicate way possible. “Momma,
did those men hurt you?”
Her mother’s stare became vacant, drifting off to blind moments of a past Evelyn hadn’t been
present for. “Yes.”
Images flickered through Evelyn’s mind of her mother before life demolished her softness, before a
life of drugs and prostitution eradicated all optimism for something better. She struggled to voice her question. There was violence and then there was defilement. “Did they hit you?”
“No. They’s come in shouting and shot your daddy. I was so shocked I cried and screamed. They
just held me down and did what men do as I cried. Then they’s left me there to die. But I didn’t die.
And then I’s had you.”
How had they gotten on this topic?
Her mother made a sound as if the memories caused her pain. “It was so hot that spring and as I lay
there all I could smell was the blood. Smelled like copper pennies.”
Evelyn swallowed as something cold and unwelcome slithered through her insides. These details
had always been coveted because they were mostly unknown, but now she wanted to erase them from
her mind.
All Evelyn knew about her birth was that it happened in winter. How long were women pregnant
for? Her father couldn’t have died in springtime. “Momma, what color eyes did Daddy have?”
“Brown like mine.”
Evelyn glanced at the mirror over the sink in the corner of the room and stared at her light blue
eyes. Oh God. She’d never met her father, only held him as a memory of some piece of her she’d never know. But if what Pearl meant was that he had never truly been her father in any sense of the
word— oh God— she felt robbed of everything and nothing at all.
“I have to go,” she wheezed.
Pearl turned, coming out of whatever trance she’d fallen into. “I’ll come with you.”
Evelyn stood and smiled sadly. “No, Momma. You have to stay here.”
All softness morphed into cold, hard angles as her mother glared. “No. I’m gonna come with you.
We gonna go home. ’Nough of this place and pretendin’ to be people we ain’t.”
Evelyn shut her eyes and waited as Pearl, the mother who just held her the way she so desperately
needed to be held, transformed into the selfish woman Evelyn knew too well. Her mom was sick.
There were tests they could perform and specialists they could visit, but for what purpose? Beyond her
physical ailments was an endless heap of mental issues. Labeling them solved nothing.
She slowly collected her bag as her mother argued. Her voice grew shrill with accusations, too cruel
for Evelyn to listen to. As she backed out of the room, shutting away the raving woman on the other
side, her mind shut off.
She walked the halls with no recollection of scenery or others passing by. It was all a blur until the
moment she pressed the green button on her phone and heard Lucian’s voice on the other end.
“Evelyn?”
“Can you come pick me up?”
He was quiet for a moment. “Are you at work? Is everything all right?”
Thankfully she was out of tears. “I’m at Pearl’s.”
He didn’t ask how she’d gotten there or what had transpired in order for her to leave work early. He
only said what she needed to hear. “I’ll be right there.”
Sliding the phone back into her bag, she realized she was outside once more. She walked to the curb
and sat on the low lip of yellow-painted pavement and waited. The rehab was closer to Lucian’s estate
than her apartment or the hotel. It would take him some time to drive there. As the minutes ticked by
she thought of nothing beyond the ache in her back and the invisible weight on her shoulders.
Time passed in increments of devastated hope. The little bit she had in the world had just been cut
down by half. The loss of those childhood imaginings, of a heroic father she lost before he ever got to hold her, were stripped down to nothing more than the remnants of a criminal act. She was the
leftovers of the monsters who decimated the only home her mother had been able to lay claim to.
The insignificant pieces that amounted to her existence became the flesh and bones that held her
together. And for the life of her, she couldn’t find the nerve to go on.
The slight pelting of drops barely registered as the sky gave way to spring showers. Her heated
clothing grew damp and clung to her body, another weight to bear.
A delivery truck of some sort pulled into the lane separating her from the courtyard beyond the