CHAPTER 185

BEING BORN HURTS, BEING REBORN HURTS EVEN MORE!

Lara took a deep breath, her voice filled with exhaustion. She continued her narrative:

"But I don't know, I do know... it was a shame! The shame that my father felt, which made him disappear for a few days after being dragged onto the street and beaten by a woman much smaller than him, with his wife's help. He was drunk, he said afterward, and that's why he got beaten. But he used to beat us even when he was drunk. But what happened next was that Dinah entered our house again, breathless and strange, and fell to her knees in the living room. She vomited on our floor and cried. Then she apologized to us, crying with her bruised face from my father's punch. She begged us for forgiveness, from us and my mother, and she redeemed the love we had for her, the love that had been tarnished. But it was so easy to win us over. Any smile could buy us because they were so rare.

Dinah told us that we could be whatever we wanted, that we were special