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been carrying this guilt with me every day since your mother died. Every time I look at you, I see my baby sister.”
    “Uncle Arthur, you’re not making any sense. Just tell me.”
    “I just don’t want you to hate me.”
    “I could never hate you. I love you.”
    “And I love you, too, girl, as if you were my own.”
    She smiled at his sincerity but it didn’t abate the curiosity eating away at her. Aya gave his hand another squeeze. “Whatever it is you have to say, I promise I won’t hate you.”
    He took a deep breath and exhaled. “You remember when you and your mother came to live with me?”
    “Yes. Daddy was killed. After he died, I don’t remember my mother smiling much, if at all.” Her father had been a participant in a mass protest for better wages at a power plant where he’d worked. The executives had not only been unwilling to negotiate with the workers, they’d called the enforcers on them for trespassing. In turn, the enforcers had opened fire on the crowd with military style weapons, killing close to a hundred people. Her father had been among the casualties. Neither the executives of the plant nor the enforcers, who had perpetuated the massacre, were held accountable for what they had done. It was still referred to as Bloody Friday.
    “Right. At the time, I was barely making ends meet. I was working at the old mill that was on the verge of being shut down. To help out, your mother decided to take a job cleaning houses. I told her I would take another job to help support us but your mother wouldn’t hear of it. Once she set her mind on something, there was no talking her out of it. She was stubborn. That’s where you get it from.” A ghost of a smile tilted her uncle’s lips as he talked about his beloved younger sister. He didn’t often talk about her mother but when he did, there was always a twinkle in his eye.
    “She actually began to make decent money cleaning houses and for a while, I didn’t think anything of the extra money she would bring in. In fact, she was making more money than I was at the mill. We were living comfortably, at least as comfortable as we could in our situation. The first time she came home with a bruise on her arm the size of an orange, she dismissed it as an accident on the job. But then she started coming home with cuts and bruises regularly. She refused to tell me what was happening to her. Violet was losing weight and she always looked tired. She’d wake up screaming in the middle of the night. But, she still refused to tell me what was going on.”
    Aya remembered not long before her mother died how she began to look sickly. Her uncle had always been vague about her mother’s death and what the exact cause was. But from bit and pieces he had told her over the years, she’d figured it was because her mother had caught the attention of the wrong person. Her uncle had always insisted her death had been an accident.
    “Her death wasn’t an accident, was it?”
    Uncle Arthur squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head. “No.”
    “How did she die?”
    “You mother was so full of life. She liked to laugh and had this smile that would light up a room. She was so beautiful, men would literally stop in their tracks when she walked by. I can’t even begin to tell you how many fights I got into when we were kids trying to protect her from some boy who tried to get out of line with her.” A faint smile briefly curved his lips as he reminisced. “You’re a lot like her. Not just in looks but temperament, too. Like I said, she caught the eye of many men and there were several who could have offered her a very comfortable lifestyle but she only had eyes for your father.”
    “You’re hedging.”
    “You’re right. You’re right. I, uh…I was getting concerned for her safety so one day I took off work and followed her. She wasn’t cleaning houses like she claimed she was. There was only one house she went to. Some sadistic bastard was using her for his