MY FATHER KICKED ME OUT AFTER I MARRIED HIS DRIVER—EIGHT YEARS LATER, HE CAME TO MEET HIS GRANDCHILDREN FOR THE FIRST TIME AND SCREAMED, “HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE?”
For twenty-seven years, my father’s house had rules for everything.
Which door you used depended on who you were. Family came through the front. Staff came through the side. Grief, in that house, came through neither — it stayed locked up in the east wing, behind a door nobody was allowed to open, where a portrait of my mother hung above a cold fireplace that hadn’t been lit since before I could walk.
My name is Simone Whitmore. My father is Harold Whitmore, the man who built Whitmore Realty Group out of a single strip mall in Millhaven into a name that sat on half the buildings downtown. And for twenty-seven years, I lived like a guest in his kingdom — fed well, dressed well, watched close.
My mother, Corinne, died six days after I was born. A hemorrhage the doctors didn’t catch in time. I never knew her voice. I only knew the version of her my father kept behind glass — a woman frozen at twenty-nine, smiling in a yellow dress, forever young while the rest of us got old around her.
Aunt Denise, my father’s older sister, moved into the house after that and raised me the way you’d raise something you were terrified of breaking. She was the one who taught me to set a table, to curtsy for my father’s business partners, to keep my voice soft in rooms full of men who talked too loud. She loved me. I never doubted that. But love in that house always came wrapped in warnings.
“You have your mother’s womb,” she told me once, when I was fifteen and doubled over in the school nurse’s office with cramps so bad I couldn’t stand. “Whitmore women carry fragile. You hear me? Fragile.”
The specialist my father flew in from three states over used a gentler word — uterine insufficiency, a condition that ran in my mother’s bloodline, the same one that had complicated her own pregnancy and, in the end, taken her life. The doctor told my father, in the calm voice doctors use when they’re about to say something a man doesn’t want to hear, that carrying a child to term would likely be difficult for me. Multiple pregnancies, he said, might not be possible at all without specialized care most hospitals couldn’t provide.
