Chapter 1
My name is Maya Vance, and the night Arthur Sterling pulled his belt from his pants in front of my mother, I understood something I had been refusing to understand for three years.
She was not going to stop him.
That knowledge arrived without drama, without the particular shock I might have expected, because in some part of me that had been watching and recording and quietly filing things away since the first dinner in this house when Arthur corrected the way I held a fork, I had already known. Some people use their silence to protect themselves. My mother had been using hers to protect a house and a last name and an address in a neighborhood where the neighbors waved from driveways and didn't ask questions, and she had been using mine the same way.
Three years. Three years of keeping my voice down, my opinions to myself, my presence in this house as light as possible because the household ran more smoothly when I pretended I wasn't in it. My stepbrother Julian was Arthur's son from his first marriage, the kind of man who had inherited his father's understanding that a last name could accomplish what character wouldn't. He had been in this house longer than I had and he had learned, in that time, that no one came running when sounds came from the hallway that had nothing to do with footsteps.
The argument had started at nine o'clock. I was coming from the kitchen when Julian stepped into my path near the study, and he did the thing he had been doing in small increments for the better part of a year, which was test the distance between what he was permitted to do and what he thought he could get away with. His hand found my wrist first and then the wall behind me and his face had the confidence of someone who has never been corrected.
May you like
I corrected him.
The heel of my palm connected with his nose with the specific force of someone who learned to defend herself during two years of living alone in a city where Arthur Sterling's name carried no weight, and Julian went back into the wall making a sound that had nothing to do with dignity. His blood was on the white towel from the guest bathroom before Arthur's study doors had fully opened.
