The woman my father had raised was real, and she was still in here, underneath fifteen years of careful self-diminishment, and she was, I was beginning to understand, extremely difficult to frighten.

Chapter 8 — How Awkward

Two hours later, Claudia walked into my hospital room.

She was wearing a hot-pink designer dress and carrying a luxury handbag, and she brought no flowers, which I noted, because even now some old part of me was keeping the courtesies.

She looked at me lying in the bed with tubes still in my arm and a bandage at my hairline, and she smiled.

“Well, look at you,” she said, her voice sugared and poisonous.