Page 59 of Virgin Sacrifice

She looked tired, and she let out a heavy sigh before she spoke. “I’m your mother, Penelope.”

She and I watched as the big house I had lived in with my father and Felicity burned up. I could smell the smoke even from far away. The firemen would come soon.

“I hope you burn in hell, you hijo de puta,” the woman said, sounding angry again.

She spat on the ground through the window of the car we were in. I had never been in one like this before. It smelled a bit funny, and you had to roll the windows up and down by hand. There was a wooden rosary and a paper pine tree hanging from the mirror.

I wanted to ask her what that word was.

“It’s time to go, mija. Are you ready?” She looked worried. I wondered if she was scared I would disappear.

I fell asleep, and when I woke up, we were far away from Oregon. The woman kept on driving. She told me how I had to be Luz now. Luz Amelia Torres. She told me that Penelope Callister was dead now.

I didn’t tell her Penelope died a long time ago.

Chapter twenty-seven

Luz

Hollow Oak, Present

It took me a while to reassure Autumn that I was going to be all right, that I was just reacting poorly to the news about the body and had overdone it on the birthday treats. Eventually, I got her to accept that I needed to rest some more, although it still took her several trips in and out of my room to clear up the birthday buffet, and several pinky promises on my behalf to text her if I needed anything, before she finally retreated back to her own room.

“I mean it, Luz, anything at all, you text me!” she warned with all the fierceness of a mama bear as the door shut behind her for the final time.

I waited for the familiar sound of Autumn opening and closing her door. Once I knew that she was safely back in her own room, I released a deep sigh, collapsing in a heap on the bed as I ran my hands tightly through my hair.

Penelope.

Dr. James Callister had been a brilliant and respected cardiologist who had all the charming ease of someone raised with a silver spoon in their mouth. While his family was nothing compared to some of those who attended Hollow Oak, the Callisters had been in Oregon for several generations. Every boy had gone on to have distinguished careers, usually in medicine or local politics. Every girl married well. The family had roots in the community, the respect of their peers, and enough influence in local affairs to make sure their dirty secrets remained just that, secrets.

Like so many men of a certain kind of class, when he married Felicity, a former Miss Oregon runner-up, it was unsaid but understood that he might stray outside of their relationship so long as he never brought it home or into the public eye.

His affair with my mother, who had been a young nursing student at the hospital where he worked, ruined all that when she got pregnant with me. Mami was a proud woman, even then. At twenty years old, she was living on her own, estranged from her family in New York City and Puerto Rico, and was putting herself through nursing school. The first of her family to attend college, she was ambitious, dedicated, and impressionable.

According to Mami, when she first told my father that she was pregnant and planned to keep the baby, he told her that he supported her decision. He convinced her that the three of us would be a real family one day. She knew it had been wrong to start an affair with a married man, but my father had pursued her heavily. It seemed like all her dreams were coming true.

But the pregnancy progressed, and my father became more and more distant and withdrawn. He began dropping hints that it wouldn’t be possible for him to leave Felicity, that if he did, she would take him to the cleaners, leaving us in poverty. Which didn’t make sense. My father was one of the most highly paid doctors in the entire county.

I was born, and he showed up at the hospital with a lawyer and papers drawn up to terminate my mother’s parental rights. She refused to sign and kicked them out.

But then she lost her student placement at the hospital and next her scholarship. Next, her friends suddenly wanted nothing to do with her, and she was a single mother with a newborn baby all on her own. Still, it wasn’t until her landlord informed her that her lease was terminated, giving her only twenty-four hours to vacate the property, that she realized just how powerless she was against James Callister.

When she called my father, broken down, she tried furiously to argue for shared custody. He wouldn’t budge. He told her that as his child I would be afforded a lifetime of privilege, have access to a quality education, and want for nothing. In short, he could offer me the best possible life there was. But only if I was his child, a Callister. On that he would not compromise.

So, in a moment of desperation, my mother signed the papers and walked out of my life. But she never stopped thinking about me, never stopped planning how she would get me back. It took her a while, but she eventually moved away from Oregon and re-enrolled in nursing school, completing her degree.

During those years apart, spent thinking and planning, Mami came to one unavoidable conclusion—she would never be able to go against my father and win, not legally. The system simply wasn’t designed to protect someone like her. No, if she wanted her daughter back, there was only one way to do it.

James Callister would have to die.

It took her another couple of years to put together a plan that could work. It wasn’t just the issue of killing my father, but what came after. We would need a new life, a fresh start. It would take her another year to find the right person to create new identities for the two of us, ones that would stand up to scrutiny and allow us to really move on, and three more years for her to save enough money to put everything in place.

But she worked endless overtime, scrimped and saved, plotted and schemed until finally, she was ready to return for me.

She spent a month watching me and my father, waiting for the right opportunity. The night she killed him, she had been spying on the house from the woods that surrounded it. My father was a busy man, who rarely saw me, so it wasn’t unusual for weeks to go by without his abuse. But that particular evening, he was home for dinner, and I dropped a ketchup-covered fry on the antique carpet in the dining room. My mother had wanted to observe us for another couple of weeks before putting her plans into action. But when she watched my six-foot-tall father stalk across the room and shove her only child to the floor and begin to beat her with his fists, she’d known the Callisters would have to die that night.

A warm trickle of blood running down my hand pulled me back into the present. When I looked down, I saw that I had again picked my thumbnail cuticle raw, ruining the manicure I had given myself earlier in the week.

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