Mom Abandoned Me to Save Herself novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Cage
Her fever brings a mob convoy up the mountain to rescue her mother, who kicks her into the dirt and has her caged; on the mansion steps she unfolds the paper she grabbed and finds the number she memorized printed under SELLER, just as Lucius comes out for it.
When I was seven, I said ten numbers out loud to a nurse.
The next day my mother walked out of her chains and kicked me into the dirt.
I'd had a fever for four days.
On the third day I fell off the cabin step and split my forehead on the edge of it.
Father carried me down the logging road on his back because I couldn't stand up anymore.
It was the first time I'd ever been to the town at the bottom of the mountain.
The clinic smelled like soap. The nurse had a pen on a string around her neck.
"What's your name, sweetheart?"
"Jessamine."
"Is there anybody we should call, Jessamine?"
Father was outside at the truck, arguing with a man about money.
So I told her the number.
Mother had made me say it every night since I could talk.
She'd whisper it into my hair while the chain on her ankle clicked against the floor ring.
"Say it again," she'd say. "Say it a thousand times. When you're good enough at it, you'll get a reward."
The nurse wrote it down on the back of her hand.
The next morning the cars came.
A whole line of them arrived. Black ones, shiny, too clean for our road.
They filled the whole hollow, nose to tail, down past the creek.
Men in dark coats got out. Two of them carried chainsaws.
The saws screamed through the chain on Mother's ankle, and she stood up straight for the first time I could remember.
Father ran at them.
They put him on the ground in front of the cabin.
I heard his hands break first, then his knees.
He didn't scream. He made a sound a dog does when you step on it.
The tobacco tin he kept under the floorboard got kicked out into the yard. It popped open.
Papers blew across the dirt.
One of them stopped against my boot.
It was folded in four, soft from being folded so many times.
Nobody was looking at me.
I picked it up and pushed it down into my sock.
Then Mother walked past me.
She didn't look down. She went straight to the tallest man, the one in the long black coat, and threw herself into his arms.
"Lucius," she sobbed into his coat. "Lucius, you came."
He held her.
"Rowena," he said. "I've got you. We're going home."
The men started getting back into the cars.
Nobody came to get me.
"Mom," I said.
It came out small.
She turned around, and her face changed into something I'd never seen on it.
She kicked me in the chest so hard I sat down in the mud.
"Don't you ever call me that!" she screamed. "You make me sick to look at! Go die up here with him!"
I didn't cry. I was too busy trying to understand.
She'd said I'd get a reward.
The tall man didn't look at me. He only had eyes for her.
A boy climbed out of the middle car. He was maybe nine, in a navy suit with a little tie.
"Augustus, baby," Mother said, and her voice went soft for him.
He ran and grabbed her leg and stared at me.
The tall man flicked two fingers. Two of his men came for me.
Mother shrieked before they reached me.
"Don't touch her with your hands! Her blood is filthy!"
The men stopped.
One went to the back of a truck and came out with a wire dog crate.
It had a plastic water bowl clipped to the door, and it stank of old pee.
They opened it and shoved me in by my shoulders.
The boy pointed at me through the wire.
"Dad, is the monster coming with us?"
The latch snapped shut an inch from my nose.
They put the crate in the back of an SUV and shut the hatch.
The road down the mountain is all ruts.
My head hit the bars every time we bounced. The cut from the cabin step tore open again.
Blood ran into my eyes with the sweat. It stung so bad I couldn't keep them open.
I threw up on the floor of the crate and lay in it.
Somewhere on the highway we stopped.
The hatch opened. A heavy man with a gray beard and a ball cap looked in at me.
His face did something sad.
He cracked a bottle of water and pushed it toward the wire.
"Here, honey. Drink."
A hand in a black glove closed over his wrist.
It was the tall man.
"Who told you to meddle, Clem?"
The bearded man pulled his hand back. He didn't say a word.
The hatch came down, and it was dark again.
When it opened the last time, it was night.
They dragged the crate out and dropped it on a stone drive.
The house in front of me was bigger than the whole hollow. Every window was lit.
The boy held Mother's hand on the steps.
"Welcome home, Mom! Dad and me cleaned your room. It doesn't smell like those bad people anymore!"
He looked back at me when he said it.
A man in a white jacket held the door. "Mr. Kesterson, the doctor's waiting upstairs for Mrs. Kesterson."
Everybody went inside around her.
The big front door swung shut, and the light went with it.
There was one lamp left over the steps.
I pulled the paper out of my sock and unfolded it against the wire.
I couldn't read most of the words.
But I could read numbers. Mother made sure of that.
There was a nine with three zeros after it.
There was a date.
And at the bottom there was a phone number, with one word in big letters beside it.
I said it out loud, one digit at a time.
I knew it better than my own name.
It was the number I'd said a thousand times. The one I gave the nurse.
I sounded out the word the way Mother taught me on the cabin wall.
S. E. L. L. E. R.
Seller.
Behind me the front door opened again.
Boots came down the stone steps, slow.
The tall man crouched in front of the crate, and his coat brushed the drive.
"My wife says you took something out of that cabin," he said.
Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend