Clara wore her new green silk dress to dinner that night. She had bought it in one of the fashionable shops in the village near her school. It was the kind of dress her aunt would have bought for her in a different world, the kind of dress to wear to the theatre in New York. The dress clung to her hips, and she smiled at her reflection in the full-length mirror. She wasn’t going to hide herself because her stepfather was a lecherous bastard. Even at fourteen, Clara wasn’t a woman to hide from anything.
As she came down the curved staircase, Clara heard her mother cursing in the kitchen. Jessica was trying to warm up the gourmet dinner Brenda had left for them, and it sounded as if her mother’s attempt to turn on her own oven wasn’t going well.
Clara stood in the hallway and heard Darren
