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The funeral rites for my mother had barely ended when my stepmother moved into my home, her daughter in tow.
In my last life I tore the house apart. I threw Selina Lawrence's luggage out the door and jabbed a finger in Mortimer Henson's face, calling him a heartless, faithless man.
Then he slapped me to the floor, drove me out that same night, and severed all ties between father and daughter.
I never even got the money for college.
So I dropped out and went to work in an electronics plant, where a machine on the line caught my right hand and took three fingers.
In the end I starved to death in a rented room in a rundown tenement district.
When I died I weighed under seventy pounds. On the nightstand sat a phone with a cracked screen, and the last message on it had been sent to Mortimer Henson.
【Dad, lend me ten dollars for food. Please, I'm begging you.】
The message showed as read. There was no reply.
At that very moment, he was throwing a wedding for Madge Fox. He'd handed over two million in dowry, and the officiant was reading out vows about a father's love being steady as a mountain.
Living it all again, I don't make a scene.
Because this time, I'm going to make every one of them pay.
……..
So when Mortimer Henson came home with Selina Lawrence.
In front of everyone, I bowed to Selina, low and respectful.
“Aunt Selina, I hope you'll look after us from now on.”
Everyone froze.
A flicker of triumph crossed Selina's eyes, then she pasted on a smile and reached to help me up.
“What a good girl. So mature about all this.”
I straightened up with her hand, keeping my head lowered.
“Dad's right. Mom's gone, and we still have to go on living. Aunt Selina took care of Dad for three years, so she's done this family a kindness. I'll be a good daughter to you from now on.”
The lines smoothed from Mortimer Henson's forehead. He even looked moved.
“If you can see it that way, then I can rest easy.”
He thought I'd grown up. Grown sensible.
He didn't know I only wanted them to die a little more wretchedly.
That night, I brewed Selina a cup of tea.
“Aunt Selina, this is white tea my mom left behind. It was her favorite when she was alive.”
I held the cup out, my eyes rimmed red, my voice trembling.
“I'd like you to have a cup. Think of it as my mom watching from above, entrusting this family to you.”
Put that way, she had no choice but to drink it.
Selina took the cup, and the moment the tea touched her lips, I saw the look on her face.
She thought she'd won.
I kept my head down and hid the smile at the corner of my mouth.
I'd added a slow-acting endocrine disruptor to the tea. Colorless, tasteless. Taken over time, it causes irreversible damage to ovarian function.
Simply put, she could forget about ever carrying a child again in this life.
Selina was thirty-eight this year. Her biggest bargaining chip was her womb.
She was counting on giving Mortimer Henson a son to lock down her place as Mrs. Henson for good.
In my last life she did give birth, and Mortimer Henson was so pleased he signed over thirty percent of the company's shares to her and her son. I got nothing.
This time, her womb was just barren ground where nothing would ever sprout.
But making her infertile wasn't enough.
I wanted her to live out her days as a joke.
Later, lying in bed at midnight, I couldn't sleep a wink. After all, there was a good show waiting the next day.
