1. The Casual Cruelty
It was a humid, suffocating Sunday afternoon in Wichita. The air conditioning in my mother’s house was struggling to keep up with the relentless Kansas heat, but the real discomfort was entirely atmospheric.
I was thirty-one weeks pregnant. My ankles were swollen to the point of unrecognizability, and a dull, persistent ache radiated from my lower back, a constant reminder of the life growing inside me. I sat awkwardly on the edge of my mother’s plush, floral sofa, trying to find a position that didn’t make it difficult to breathe.
I shouldn’t have been there. My obstetrician had suggested “light socialization” to help keep my slightly elevated blood pressure down, a naive recommendation that completely failed to account for the reality of my family dynamic. I had only come because my husband, Aaron, was out of town on a three-day business trip to Oklahoma City, and the oppressive silence of our empty house had finally driven me to accept my mother’s obligatory Sunday dinner invitation.
It was a terrible, catastrophic mistake.
My older sister, Nicole, was lounging sideways in the oversized armchair across from me. She was thirty-four, but she carried herself with the performative, exhausting energy of a teenager desperately trying to go viral on TikTok. She was currently scrolling mindlessly through her phone, occasionally pausing to record short, mundane clips of the room for her meager social media following.
Her ten-year-old son, Dylan, was tearing through the house like a feral animal.
Dylan was a menace. There was no other word for it. He was ten years old—more than old enough to understand basic boundaries and consequences—but he had been raised in an environment utterly devoid of either. Nicole treated his aggressive, destructive behavior as quirky “content” or brushed it off with a dismissive wave and a muttered “boys will be boys.” My mother, the matriarch who demanded absolute respect from everyone else, flat-out refused to discipline her only grandson, treating him like a golden prince who could do no wrong.
Suddenly, Dylan sprinted into the living room from the hallway connecting to the garage. He was clutching a dense, heavy, red rubber dodgeball—the kind used in gym classes, designed to sting when it hit you.
He was breathing heavily, a manic, wild look in his eyes.
“Dylan, please don’t throw that in here,” I said automatically, my voice tight with immediate anxiety. I shifted my weight, placing a protective, instinctive hand over the swell of my stomach. “There are too many breakable things, and I don’t want to get hit.”
Dylan stopped dead in his tracks in the center of the living room rug.
He didn’t look at the television. He didn’t look at his mother. He looked directly at my swollen belly, and then slowly raised his eyes to meet my face.
