Page 110

I watched me.

My foot caught, my knee buckled, and my shoulders pitched forward before my arms ever moved. There was no pause between falling and hitting her, no moment when anger or fear or anything else could've become intention.

Doryu stopped the recording again, but I shook my head before he could move away from the laptop. “Again, please. Slower if you can.”

He adjusted the playback speed.

This time there was no possibility of missing it.

The sneaker caught first.

Then the ankle.

Then my body falling.

Then my hands.

I gripped the edge of the table hard enough that my fingers hurt, and somewhere behind me Max moved. I heard the faint sound of his shoe against the carpet and knew he'd come closer, although he still didn't touch me.

“I tripped.”

Doryu's answer was gentle but unequivocal. “Yes.”

I looked at him because I needed to see whether there was any uncertainty in his face. There wasn't, but twenty years of believing something didn't disappear simply because another man confirmed what was sitting directly in front of me.

“But I hit her.”

“You did,” Doryu agreed. “Because you were falling.”

My gaze returned to the screen, where my mother was frozen halfway down the stairs with her head turned toward me.

Something moved at the edge of my memory.

She'd told me to be careful.

I hadn't remembered that in years, but suddenly I could hear her voice as clearly as if she were standing in the room. We had to hurry because Dad was out drinking and Mom was afraid he'd get back before we got away. She'd told me to stay close, then told me not to run on the stairs.

I'd run anyway.

Not because I was angry, but because I was seven and terrified she'd leave me behind.

My sneaker had caught, and I'd reached out because I was falling.

Or maybe I'd reached for her.

I couldn't remember which, and for the first time, it occurred to me that it didn't matter.

“I didn't deliberately push her.”

The words came out so quietly that I wasn't sure anyone else heard them, but Max did. He moved into my peripheral vision, stopping beside me rather than between me and the screen, and when I looked at him, his eyes were wet.

“You were trying to reach your mom.”

Something inside me gave way.

I looked back at the boy on the screen and tried to find the monster my father had shown me for twenty years. I tried to see a child capable of deliberately pushing his mother down a flight of concrete stairs, but all I could see was a terrified little kid running after the only safe person he had.

My father had made me hate that little boy.