Make Me Beg, Daddy

Chapter 15

“Like recognizes like.”

She nods. Then she opens the door.

The party comes in all at once—light across the tile, forty conversations, a kid shrieking, ice in glasses. The bright yellow of the kitchen falls on her back and her hair and the shoulder of a black cardigan.

I get a half-second of the shape of her before I retreat back into the bend of the wall, out of the light.

And in that half-second, a man’s voice comes over the top of everything else.

“Hey—there she is! Dee! Delilah. Babe, your mother’s been hunting you for ten minutes.”

The door swings shut.

The party dwindles back down to a hum.

I stand in the dark with the whiskey bottle by my foot and my cup up on the shelf, waiting for the show to begin.

As I do, I say her name, just to see what it does in my mouth.

“Delilah.”

Oh, that tastes good.

“De-li-lah. Delilah.”

Yes. Sweet. Demure. Pure. Perfect.

I pick up my cup and take a sip.

I’m going to enjoy this.

I come tumbling out of the pantry like somebody shoved me.

I promptly run right into Connor’s chest.

He steadies me with a hand on the elbow and frowns down. “Dee, there you are! In… the pantry? What the heck were you doing in there?”

“I needed, uh…” I cast around for something to explain why I was crouching among the cereal and spare toilet paper. All at once, the sense memory of the green-eyed stranger’s whiskey-tinged breath floods me. “Some liquid courage,” I finish. “I’m a little nervous about doing the slideshow.”

“Oh.” He wrinkles his nose. “It’s not a big deal at all. Just some dumb pictures. Who cares?”

“Right,” I say, face heating. “Yeah, right. You’re right, of course.”

“Then let’s get it over with,” he says, firmly dragging me along with him.

Vivian meets us at the entrance to the living room. “Thank God!” she cries. “Are we doing this or not? I’ve been standing around waiting for a freaking century. Some of us have plans after, you know.”

“Sorry,” I mumble. “I got… It doesn’t matter. Yeah, let’s get started.”

I look past her to see my mom. Like the others, she rolls her eyes. “It’s about time. Weren’t you the one who wanted to do this sooner rather than later? You’ve got us all waiting on you now, Delilah, dear.”

I start to apologize again, then realize all of a sudden that I never want to say the word “sorry” to these people ever again. Instead, I say, “Put the kids in the den, Mom. All of them, and shut the door.”

She does a double-take at my tone. “Pardon me?”

“You heard me.”

Her mouth falls open. She’s not even mad; she’s just so confused at hearing this voice come out of me that she’s completely unprepared for how to respond. “I— Well, I— They’ll want to see the pictures.”

“I’m sure they’d prefer the television.” I glance past her. “Uncle Bub, can you take them?”

With a shrug, Uncle Bub lumbers out of his seat, calls to the horde of kids, and they all go tailing off after him into the den. My mother is left flabbergasted, but she doesn’t say anything else.

“Everyone!” I call out. “Find a seat! The slideshow is about to begin.”

My laptop is where I left it on the side table, cabled into my father’s projector. I crack open the lid and turn everything on. Then I grab the remote clicker, stride to the front of the room, and take my place next to the projector screen.

I turn and look out at the crowd. Fifty sets of eyes look back at me.

Here goes nothing.

“Alright,” I say. The hubbub in the room dies down. “As you can clearly see, I’m not my dad. He’s the one who did this every year. He’s gone now, but I’m still going to do it the way he did—at first. Then I’ve added my own special little surprise at the end.”

With that, I start the deck.

The screen goes white, then goes to the title card.

DORSEY FAMILY CHRISTMAS EVE

And under that, in the smaller font:

Dad’s slideshow. Year 26.

The room goes aww all at once. I click again and his version of Silent Night starts to play through the speakers.

I almost feel guilty, because the first half is so sweet and charming. A squalling, red-faced Vivian and a cherub-cheeked two-year-old me, lying on either side of my mom in her hospital bed with my dad looming next to us, grinning from ear to ear.

All four of us at Nathan’s on the boardwalk. I had mustard smeared on my nose.

Vivian’s sweet sixteen. She’s wearing a tiara.

Dad’s sixtieth. He’s asleep in a chair with a paper crown crooked on his head, and I’m behind him, out of focus, a cake in my hands.

The rest of the family is threaded throughout. Uncle Johnny manning the grill at a Memorial Day barbecue, Aunt Virginia and Uncle Dave dancing at a wedding, Cousin Maryanne’s Halloween party, a family reunion at the lake, my grandmother at ninety, sitting straight up in a folding chair with her purse in her lap, because she never once put it down at a party in her life.

I click. I click. I click again.

The oohs and awws and laughs continue. Not one person in here is unhappy right now. They are all having a lovely f*****g time.

And then the deck gets to my sister.

It’s the high life captured one frame at a time. She glows and puffs up bigger and bigger with every single one.

Cannes, Tulum, Rio de Janeiro.

Nightclubs, yachts, helicopters, mansions.

Pretty clothes and flashing jewelry, blown-out hair and glistening nails.

My skinny, perfect, radiant sister always perfectly captured.

“Doesn’t she photograph well?” my mother sighs. “My little girl is such a beauty.”

Everyone is eating it up, but three people are even more enthralled than the rest.

My mother.

My husband.

And Vivian herself.

I stand tall in my shapeless black cardigan and wait. Wait. Wait. Wait just a little bit longer, savoring the last few seconds these people will ever have before the curtain is ripped back and the mask is removed and they come to see her for what she really is…

… and then I click one more time.

The next slide confuses them a bit.

A cropped shot of a notification, with the little iCloud badge and all, blown up big.

Vivian Dorsey has added 3 new videos to the Dorsey Sisters shared album.

1:04 A.M.

“This came in the night before last while I was making four hundred sugar cookies,” I explain. “Viv and I have had a shared album since 2015. Her phone backs up to it. She’s never turned it off. Here’s what she uploaded.”

Click.

The clip I cobbled together runs. It’s brief but devastating.

Four seconds of a dark bedroom.

A headboard, my quilt, the ring I gave my husband.

Two bodies intertwined.

Then the audio.

A moan.

Another.

His.

Hers.

Cut.

Connor speaks. “This is so f*****g reckless. We’re gonna get caught.”

Vivian answers. “Relax. She never notices anything.”

My husband’s sigh. My sister’s laugh.

End of footage.

I don’t think there are words that can describe the quality of the crowd’s silence. They think they’ve just seen something horrible.

They don’t know we’re just getting started.

“That’s my bed,” I say. “That’s my headboard, my quilt, my house. On August eighth, I was asleep on the cot in my bakery after a very long night of work. Meanwhile, my sister was f*****g my husband in my bed.”

“Dee.” Connor pushes off the sideboard. “Dee, turn it off.”

“I’m not done.”

“Turn it off⁠—”

“Ed,” I say, “would you keep your son where he is, please?”

And Ed, God bless the loudest man in Brooklyn, puts a hand on Connor’s chest to sit him right back down.

I click again. “In case anyone was unsure or thinks I’m lying, I grabbed a helpful little freeze frame and blew it up. As you can see right… here… that’s the heart tattoo on Vivian’s hip, and right next to it is my husband’s hand, gold wedding band included.”

Next.

“When Vivian realized that she’d accidentally uploaded these videos to our shared album, she hurried to delete them. As you can see here and here. Unfortunately for her, it was too late.”

Next.

“This image shows a hotel receipt from the Marriott by the Brooklyn Bridge. They got steak-frites and then a little sweet treat for the two of them. How nice, right? But— Oh, dear. What’s that date say?”

The date runs a foot tall across the top of it. 7 FEB 2026.

“Delilah,” my mother snaps, “what the hell is this?”

“Read the date, Mom.”

From the back of the room, from an aunt who has done the crossword at every family function of my life, comes a horrified gasp.

“Oh—oh, God. Leanne… Leanne, that’s the day we buried him.”

“It is,” I say. “I guess funerals put them in the mood.”

Click.

“But they were in the mood a lot this year,” I continue. “I happened to come across some text messages they’d been exchanging. Look here, and here, and here, and here, and— Well, I could go on, but you get the point. They liked to meet up at that hotel a lot.”

Click.