But pain makes you slow, and hope makes you stupid.
My name is Claire Monroe Whitmore. I was twenty-nine years old when I gave birth in St. Anne’s Women’s Center in Alexandria, Virginia, and learned in the span of one day that the man I had married would never really choose me over the mother who had spent three years trying to make me disappear.
Patricia Whitmore had never liked me.
That sentence is too small, actually. Dislike is what people feel about annoying coworkers or a neighbor’s barking dog. Patricia regarded me as contamination. An error. A social infection that had somehow made its way into her bloodline.
To Patricia, I was the girl from nowhere. The one with no family name that mattered, no old Virginia money, no polished pedigree, no network of senators, judges, country clubs, or old chapel weddings. I was the daughter of a single mother who worked herself half to death and kept secrets even on good days. I grew up in a modest apartment outside Richmond, then worked part-time jobs through community college, then finished my degree while juggling rent, grief, and student loans like everyone else in America who wasn’t born on a cushion.
