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At the national championship, I came into the final turn with my brakes gone, went off the cliff, lost the title, and ended up a vegetable.
When I came to, I could hear my wife talking with her friends.
"Marina James, you cut Bryan Rowe's brakes. Weren't you afraid he'd die?"
"Well, it was to help Peter Sanchez live out his dream of winning."
"Bryan's mother didn't call the police?"
"No! The whole idea was something my mother-in-law signed off on. Even if the truth comes out, she'll write me a letter of understanding."
"Why would Bryan's mother help you?"
"Because Peter is the child of my mother-in-law's first love. She treats him very well!"
"Bryan's really got it rough, huh?"
My wife stroked my cheek gently. "Bryan may be in a coma, but he has me here to keep him company and take care of him. He should be satisfied."
...
The feeling of a knife carving through my heart drowned out the tearing pain in my body.
Never in a thousand years did I imagine that the woman I loved and my own mother had joined hands to turn me into a vegetable.
That championship was the dream I'd chased my whole life, and Marina had ruined my brakes to help Peter, so that when I hit the final S-curve I couldn't stop and went straight off the cliff.
"Marina, I remember Bryan trained day and night for two years straight to win. If you hadn't sabotaged him, that title would've been his!"
"Yeah, I saw him out on the track by himself all the time, running through every kind of drill, rain or shine. Sometimes he'd fall and bleed and still grit his teeth and keep going."
"Marina, isn't this a little much?"
Marina burst out laughing. "This is too much? I'm even thinking of having a baby with Peter!"
"What?"
"The moment I look at Peter, I feel sorry for him. I can't wait to shower him with love. He once joked that he wanted a child with me, and I said yes, laughing."
"But Marina, you and Bryan were together ten years. He asked you again and again to have a baby, and you always turned him down—"
"Because I'm afraid of the pain! I even thought about quietly having Peter's baby and letting Bryan raise it. That way I'd get to stay with Bryan and have Peter's child too. How wonderful would that be."
"My mother-in-law has always regretted not having a child with her first love back then, so she fully supports me giving Peter a baby."
The room went quiet. No one picked the thread back up, and before long the talk drifted to other things.
My eyelids kept twitching, but I couldn't force my eyes open.
My wife and my mother had done something this absurd behind my back.
My heart was bleeding raw.
Peter was my foster brother, a few months younger than me. When I was in high school, his father died of an illness and his mother remarried, leaving no one to look after him, so my mother took him into our home.
She favored him plainly. After he moved in, my allowance shrank a lot, while his was several times mine.
Through all three years of high school, my mother threw him three birthday dinners at a restaurant, and I was like something forgotten. I didn't even get a birthday cake.
Thinking of how pitiful his life had been, I chose to swallow it all in silence.
