Page 66 of Cryptic Curse

Present Day…

I woke up a day later in the hospital.

The feeling of emptiness overwhelmed me.

Brisa was gone.I knew it before I even opened my eyes.

“You’re awake.”

I turned my head to see my father sitting in a chair next to me.

Of course he was sitting there.Acting the concerned parent.After he beat me and caused me to lose my baby.

“The baby is gone,” he said.

That was no news to me.He wouldn’t have had it any other way.

“Medicine had to intervene.”He shifted his gaze, narrowing his eyes at me.“After that beating you took by a stranger in the street, you were bleeding profusely.I’m afraid the baby couldn’t be saved.”

I looked straight ahead.

The way my father said the words, I could almost swear he believed them himself.

No doubt it was what he had to tell the doctors when he brought me to the hospital.

“And the doctors learned something else very sad,” he continued, a grin flickering behind the mock sympathy in his eyes.“It turns out you carry the gene for Huntington’s disease.You shouldn’t have a child.You would pass on the gene, and the child would eventually die of the debilitating disease.So I did the only responsible thing a father could.I gave permission to have your fallopian tubes tied.”

Did I hear him correctly?Or was I in a drug-induced haze?

He had my tubes tied?

Could he even do that without my consent?

Of course he could.He was Jacinto Agudelo.He could do anything.Wave enough money in a doctor’s face and you can convince him to render a teenage girl sterile.

“So, Daniela.This was your last baby.You’ll never have another.”

Tears well in my eyes as I remember that fateful day.

No more babies.

Not ever.

Which is why I love Belinda so much.She’s the only child I’ll ever have.

And I can’t lose her.

21

HAWK

Ikeep shovels in my truck.

I mean, you never know when you’re going to have to dig something up, right?

Sometimes seedlings in the orchard, sometimes a rogue cottonwood that threatens to coat the grazing fields in that white shit every spring.

Or sometimes you have a diseased steer that can’t go to the slaughterhouse.