Reborn: I Let My Mother Suffer the Price of Her Favoritism novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: The Night Before
Sloane slams Callie into the wall and throws hot tea in her face while her mother and brother say be understanding. That night Callie gives her mother the bridal suite, and Sloane comes with a knife. Her mother bleeds and whispers: don't call anyone.
Sloane drove my head into the hallway wall at four o'clock, the afternoon before my wedding.
The pain went through my skull and my knees gave.
She still had a fistful of my hair.
"You think you're better than me," she said, and her red lipstick was smeared where she had chewed it.
She reached back to the hall table, took the cup Mom had handed her twenty minutes earlier, and threw the tea in my face.
It was hot, and I screamed.
Our housekeeper dropped the laundry basket at the foot of the stairs.
Mom came out of the kitchen drying her hands, and my brother came down the stairs two at a time.
Nobody ran to me.
My brother pulled Sloane off by the shoulders, and Mom took her face in both hands.
"Sloane, honey, look at me. Breathe."
Sloane's eyes cleared at once.
She started to cry.
I was on the floor with tea running down my neck and my cheek burning.
Mom looked at me over Sloane's shoulder.
"What did you say to her, Callie?"
"Nothing."
"She doesn't do this for nothing," my brother said. "You know how she gets before big days. Why do you always set her off?"
"Your sister is unwell," Mom said. "You are the strong one. Put some ice on that, and don't mention it to Everett. I won't have him thinking this family is a circus the night before the wedding."
Eight years of that.
I had been slapped, scalded, and pushed down the back stairs, and I had been the one who apologized every single time.
Then I had died anyway.
I remembered every minute of it. In the life before this one, the knife came into my room at two in the morning on the night after this exact afternoon.
Mom took my phone out of my hand while I was trying to dial.
My brother, Dale, locked the doors so the neighbors wouldn't see an ambulance.
They called the housekeeper to hold towels on my chest, and they waited until I stopped being able to breathe.
I got up off the hallway floor.
"Okay," I said.
Mom's shoulders dropped, glad that I had given in again.
"Thank you, sweetheart. That's my girl."
So I said nothing about the wall, or the tea, or the knife that had not come yet.
I washed my face in the downstairs bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror.
I was twenty-six, and I was still alive.
I knew exactly how this night went, so this time I was going to change who was in the bed.
At six I found Mom in the kitchen, stirring a pot she didn't need to stir.
Everyone at St. Brendan's knew her as Maureen Haldane, who ran the altar guild and never raised her voice.
"Mom, take the big bed tonight."
She didn't turn around. "What?"
"The west bedroom. The photographer wants shots of you getting ready tomorrow, and that room has the window. You'll be tired. Take the good mattress and sleep in."
Now she turned, with her hand on her pearls.
"You'd give up your own bridal suite for me?"
"You've done so much this week."
Her eyes went wet, and I could have laughed.
She had never once looked at me like that for anything real.
"Well," she said. "That's very thoughtful. I'll take it."
She went up to change the sheets herself.
At ten she carried Sloane's bedtime tea up to the south room, as she had every night for twelve years.
She stood in the doorway and watched Sloane drink every drop.
Then Mom went to bed in my room, in my nightgown, in the big bed with the good mattress.
I lay on the narrow bed in her room across the hall with the door open a hand's width.
Dale was asleep down the hall, because he always came the night before big days.
My phone was in my hand, set to record, with the screen turned down against my chest.
The house ticked and settled.
The clock on Mom's nightstand said 1:52.
A floorboard in the hall creaked under a careful foot.
I stopped breathing.
Sloane went past my door in her bare feet, in the red satin dress she had worn to dinner.
She did not look in at me.
In her right hand, held low along her thigh, was the paring knife from the kitchen block.
She opened the west bedroom door and went in.
I stood and crossed the hall in three steps.
I raised my phone to the gap.
Sloane stood over the big bed, and the lamp on the dresser lit her face.
"You always get everything," she whispered.
She brought the knife down.
The sound that came out of the bed was not mine.
It was my mother, high and short, and then she was sitting up with her hand clamped on her shoulder and blood coming through her fingers.
Sloane stared at her.
"Mom?" she said.
Mom saw me in the doorway with the phone pointed at her.
I watched her understand, in one breath, what I had done.
Her face went grey and then furious, and then it did something I had never seen it do for me.
She whispered, "Callie, don't call anyone."
Blood ran down her nightgown onto the sheet.
"Think of Sloane."
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