Page 21 of Adam
I need to get up and take action. I need a damn painkiller, otherwise I’ll pass out from the headache.
After a lot of internal struggles, I get out of bed and head to the kitchen to find my longed-for pills.
The house, as always, is full of people doing their job, without lifting their heads to look around or even talk to me. It took me years to understand that, but they do it out of fear. Fear that they might speak wrongly and give my father one more excuse to kill them.
It’s bad enough that he practically abducted them from their families and hometown, forcing them to follow us to LA, but the fact that they’re slowly losing their voices over the years makes him look like the devil.
As I walk through the cavernous corridors, I see people I’ve never seen before in my life. I know today is Maria’s turn to do the dusting, but instead, there’s some new lady quietly wipingdown the empty glass vases. And what a coincidence … She’s not smiling; she’s not even neutral. She’s sad as fuck.
But I, curious as always, want to go and talk to her.
As I walk towards her, she lifts her head and paces away from me as if she’s seen a ghost.
There’s no point in going after her. Obviously, she already knows the rules, and she’s understood her place too damn well.
I arrive at the kitchen, and, strangely, it’s completely deserted, but it looks like someone was just here. The oven’s still warm, and the air smells like roast.
I reach for the top cabinet, find the painkillers, and down two in one gulp without water.
“Rough night?”
I jump in surprise and turn around in a swift motion.
“Good morning to you too, Mother.”
With a cold and distant father like Fabio Calvano, you’d think my mom would be the saint in the story, or at least a decent human being. But obviously, things don’t exactly work out the way people expect around here.
Lorena Calvano is hands-down the cruelest, baddest bitch of them all. And not in some secretly-soft-inside kind of way where she drops one kind word and suddenly, you’re supposed to forgive years of being ice cold. No. She’s a drunk with a vicious streak, and I’m usually the one she unleashes her venom on.
She prowls closer, her cold brown gaze cutting right through me as her heels slowly clatter against the marble floor. All wealth, pearls, and rich perfume.
Sometimes I joke to myself that the devil’s actually a woman, and she came to earth reincarnated as my mother.
As I pour myself a glass of water, I feel her eyes on me, scanning and judging every move I make.
“Is there a particular reason that you look like shit?” she asks, the side of her upper lipstick-red lip hooking high.
Finally. She couldn’t hold it any longer. Such a sweetheart.
“Didn’t sleep well,” I reply apathetically, sipping my water.
She scoffs, fixing her voluminous black hair. “At least you’re consistent.”
This woman’s apathy is infuriating. “Dad shot me,” I spit out. “Thought you might care, but then again, why start now?”
She looks at her reflection on the silver fruit bowl and rubs her teeth clean from her red lipstick. “You probably did something to him.”
“That’s all you have to say?”
She drags her tongue over her teeth. “What else?”
My ears are ringing, and my heart is pounding. “My own father shot me—your only daughter—and you only have to say that I deserved it?”
She sets down the fruit bowl. “I didn’t say that; don’t twist my words.”
“You’re a horrible person.”
“Why so bitchy, Isi?”
