Page 82 of The Mistake

As if on instinct, I just can’t help it. “I’m trash.” The words spill from my lips and the moment they do, I jerk back.

Holy crap. I don’t evenknow how that spilled out. Tears sprang to my eyes. How did the conversation turn to something so trivial?

He’s dead. So fucking dead. My father. The piece of shit that he was.

The table has gone silent and I’m so mortified.

“I need to use the bathroom.”I kicked off the shoes because there’s no way I’d walk on them and get away fast enough. I push my chair back and in the process, bump a passing waiter. “Crap, I am so worry.” He doesn’t have any food, so that’s not a disaster, but everything has gone blurry.

I need to leave. Rushing away from the table, I don’t care how crazy I look, even though it doesn’t take a genius to figure out I’m a crazy woman. Why would they talk about the future and growing up?

Stepping into the bathroom, I quickly made my way into a stall and pressed my back against it. I’m relieved by the coolness of the door and lift my head up, trying to stop the tears. I didn’t want to cry. I didn’t want to remember. My mind had other ideas.

“What are you?”

“Your daughter.”

I cry out as the slap is hard and painful. My pants are down to my ankles and myfather is standing behind me. His palm is so painful.

“What are you?” he asked again.

I want to say “your daughter” again, but I don’t. He has told me what to say and even though I don’t want to, to stop the pain, I have to say the words. “Trash.”

He doesn’t hit me.

“What will you be when you grow up?”

There were so many things I wanted to be—a doctor, a nurse, a librarian, a mother, a teacher, a writer—so many things.

“Trash.”

Pulling out of the memory, I try to take a deep breath. All day, my father did that. I don’t know why he was so determined to make me say it. I had deducted that he’d been sleeping with one of my teachers and she must have told him that I wanted to be someone when I grew up.

After that day, he had done his job, becausewhenever someone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I always responded the same—I wanted to be trash. The first time, I got bullied, then I think the kids at school realized what was happening, and afterward, they never bullied me. They actually cut me some slack. I was nineteen years old.

That son of a bitch was dead and I just humiliated myself and my husband at dinner. My fucking Bratva husband in front of his boss.

“Charlotte,” he said.

“Go and enjoy dinner,” I said.

“Dinner hasn’t come outyet, Ivan told them to wait until you return.”

“I can’t go back out there.”

“Open the door,” he said.

“No.”

I feel his hands on the door, it’s so strange.

“Come on.”

I don’t want him to see me like this.

I swipe at the tears that were so rude not to stay inside my eyes. Spinning around, I open the door. “Please, just … can I go back to your house?” I asked.

“You mean home?”

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