“I’m eight weeks pregnant, Mom,"s” she sobbed, the tears finally spilling over, mixing with the blood on her lip. “I told her. I thought… I thought it would make her happy. An heir. A baby. I thought it would fix things.”
A cold, heavy dread settled in the base of my spine.
“She went crazy,” Maya gasped, her chest heaving. “She screamed that I was trying to trap them. She pushed me down the stairs. When I was on the floor, she kicked me. Over and over. She said my baby didn’t belong in their family.”
Assaulting a woman is a crime. Assaulting a pregnant woman, with the explicit, spoken intent of harming the unborn child, is an act of monstrous, irredeemable evil.
“Where was Marcus?” I asked, my voice dropping to a dangerous, absolute whisper. “Where was your husband while his sister threw you down the stairs?”
Maya squeezed her eyes shut, a fresh wave of agony twisting her battered face. “He was there, Mom. He stood at the top of the stairs. He watched her do it. He told me to stop screaming and embarrassing him. He said I was overreacting.”
The silence in the kitchen became absolute. The rhythmic ticking of the wall clock sounded like a judge’s gavel. The raw biscuits sitting on the counter suddenly felt like irrelevant relics from a different, peaceful lifetime that had just been violently stolen from us.
I didn’t cry. I didn’t scream or curse God. I gently pulled the cold washcloth from my daughter’s face, kissed the top of her blood-matted head, and stood up. I walked calmly down the hallway and engaged the heavy deadbolt on the solid oak front door.
The time for baking was over.
