She flicks her ashes onto the carpet and takes another drag.
“I’m sure you can figure out the rest. Angelo started courting me and I let myself be courted, mainly just to hurt your father. Eventually, however, I couldn’t stand any of you anymore. I didn’t want to divorce Prescott and divide the fortune, nor did I want to see the rest of you brats ever again. I told Angelo how I was thinking about murdering you all and then killing myself. He said that there were easier ways to end things. Less drastic ones. He cooked up the plan of faking my death. And that was satisfactory. For a while.”
She sighs.
“I thought that if I never saw any of you ever again that my resentment—my hate and loathing—would fade. Disappear, perhaps. That it would be dissolved by my own lassitude and languor. But, darling, no. It only grew and deepened. I couldn’t stand how I had been used to bring all of you into the world. I couldn’t stand how useless you all were. And so I began to connive to destroy you all, beginning with your father. Angelo told me what your father wanted to do with his will. How it would be a game. Angelo was worried about his own daughter, about Gabriella’s future. And so my plan started to come together. I hijacked the game and replaced your father’s clues and questions with my own. I told Angelo that if he helped me kill off Prescott’s children, Gabriella would be left alive at the end and she would inherit everything. He trusted me. I think he really did love me, in his way. Gabriella also agreed to be part of our little cabal. With a mother like me and a father like Angelo, what chance did she have to be even the slightest bit normal? So the three of us conspired to kill you all off. And then at the end… well… ”
“You chose me,” I say.
She smiles.
“I chose you.”
37
“I didn’t expect to become so fond of you,” says my mother. “After all, you ruined my life. But then again, there is so much of me in you. Your hair color. The shape of your jaw. The way you walk. The way you command a room. Even when you were a child, I had an affinity for you. Nonetheless, I thought it would be easy to kill you eventually for the humiliation you caused me by being born, but, darling, I must admit: watching you these past few months has really made me reconsider things. Accepting you the way you are has become a way for me to cherish myself more. Is that crazy?”
I give her a wry smile. “Actually, I think it’s fairly normal. Possibly the definition of motherhood. Every other fucking thing you have ever done or said so far is crazy, though.”
She snorts, laughing.
“I wouldn’t know anything about motherhood,” she says. “My own mother, your grandmother, was a bit of a nightmare horror show. We come from slave owners, you know. Not everyone had what it took to be a slave owner. You had to love it. It had to give you a real thrill.”
I shudder. She grins, leaning toward me. I feel a chill down the back of my neck but also a longing. I want her to love me. Even after everything that has happened, I want her to take me in her arms and tell me everything will be okay. I am so fucking happy to have my mother back. I am relieved that she wasn’t the weak part of me, the part willing to sacrifice myself to let Gabriella live. Instead, I now know that she is the other part of me, the part with killer instincts in the board room and at the gaming table.
I am covered in blood and glass, and I am scared out of my mind, but for the first time in a long time, I feel whole.
Of course, I can’t let her get away with what she has done. She’s come back into my life in the worst, most temporary way possible.
So good to have you back, Mother. And now you must fucking die.
“I don’t expect to get away with what I have done,” she says, as if reading my mind. “The world will look at me as the worst kind of abomination. I am a Medea, a woman who kills her own children. I have hunted them down one by one after deeming them unworthy. The world doesn’t respect the rights of mothers. A father might send his own weak children off to die in some impossible, stupid war and be lauded for it as a patriot. A mother who kills her failed children is a monster because she shows agency. And so children bend toward the traits of their fathers, not fearing their mothers as they should. Do your own children fear you?”
Of course not. The strongest emotion I elicit from them is contempt, which I am sometimes able to twist into benign fondness. But I hate my mother. I know that for a fact. I also love her. And yes, I fear her very deeply. How could I not, as she confesses what she has done while pointing a revolver at me?
“No, I don’t expect anyone to forgive me for what I have done, and I don’t expect to get away with it,” she says. And here she smiles at me shrewdly. “But do you think that they will forgive you for what you have done?”
I don’t know what to say to this. I smooth my pants down. What does she mean? I open my mouth to ask, but I don’t even know how to phrase the question.
“There are many ways that this could go,” she says. “Let me lay them out for you and then let me tell you what I think
