“Do not speak, young lady.” Her clipped words stung my ears. “You left the stove on while you were popping pills. You slept through the smoke alarm.”
She was pacing now. I watched her feet cutting a path on the floor and imagined her scowling, with her hands on her hips, but I wasn’t about to look up to see if I was right. She stopped moving.
“You’re supposed to be in treatment for this,” she said. “If I hadn’t been here, you could have died.”
Is that what this was about? I thought. I figured she’d be pissed about me almost setting fire to the house. I really didn’t expect that my well-being would factor into the conversation at all—one-sided as though this conversation might be.
“Stupid girl,” she said. “I should put you over my knee.”
Okay, maybe my well-being wasn’t so high on the
