Chapter 1 - The Cake He Was Begging Not to Eat
“OPEN YOUR MOUTH.”
Sabine Harrow had Fletcher pinned against the back of a dining chair with one hand twisted into the collar of his dark green birthday shirt.
In her other hand was a fork loaded with strawberry cake.
Three pink candles still burned on the ruined cake at the center of the dining table.
The dining room of Sabine’s house in Leawood, Kansas, had been turned into the beginning of a child’s birthday party: blue paper streamers taped crookedly across the windows, unopened dinosaur plates stacked beside juice boxes, a balloon shaped like the number three bumping softly against the chandelier.
No guests had arrived yet.
Fletcher’s face was wet with tears.
He twisted away from the fork.
“Please! It makes me sick!”
Sabine caught his chin and turned him back.
“Stop making everything difficult.”
The fork came closer.
Fletcher clamped his lips shut.
Sabine’s expression changed.
Not rage.
Something colder.
The look of someone who had decided obedience mattered more than the reason for disobedience.
The cake never touched Fletcher’s mouth.
Instead, Sabine pressed the entire piece hard against his shirt and bare thighs.
Pink frosting smeared across the dark green cotton.
Fletcher screamed.
Sabine immediately reached for another piece.
That was the moment Greer came through the dining room doorway.
She had driven forty-five minutes from Lawrence after Sabine texted that Fletcher’s birthday party had been moved earlier without explanation. She was still wearing her charcoal University of Kansas sweatshirt, copper-red hair half-falling from a ponytail.
For one second, she didn’t understand what she was seeing.
Then she did.
Greer crossed the room.
Her hand struck Sabine’s wrist and face almost in the same motion.
The fork flew across the table.
“What the hell is wrong with you?!”
Greer pulled Fletcher behind her.
Sabine grabbed a fistful of Greer’s hair.
Pain snapped through Greer’s scalp.
She spun.
Her open palm hit Sabine across the cheek.
Sabine staggered, still clutching hair.
Greer shoved her away.
Sabine crashed backward into the dining table. A chair tipped onto its side.
Fletcher buried his face against the back of Greer’s jeans, sobbing.
Sabine straightened.
Then she lunged forward and shoved Greer by the sweatshirt.
“He’s my son. If I tell him to eat, then he HAS to eat.”
Greer stopped.
The anger disappeared from her face so suddenly that Sabine seemed confused by it.
Greer looked at the strawberry frosting across Fletcher’s clothes.
Then she looked at the woman who had been raising him since he was six weeks old.
Her voice became quiet.
“YOU DIDN’T GIVE BIRTH TO FLETCHER, SO HOW DARE YOU CALL YOURSELF HIS MOTHER?”
Sabine’s face lost its color.
That was what Greer remembered later.
Not the slap.
Not the overturned chair.
Not Fletcher crying.
Sabine did not answer, “I’m the only mother he knows.”
She did not say, “I adopted him.”
She did not even tell Greer to get out.
She took one unconscious step backward.
Fear passed across her face.
Greer saw it.
And for the first time in three years, she wondered whether the story she had been told about her little brother had ever been true.
May you like
Because Sabine hadn’t looked insulted.
She had looked caught.
