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Dr. Warren was a tough nut to crack. Overworked, underappreciated, and provided by the state to assess the mental capacity of criminals, he’d well and truly checked out by the time he met me. It made sense. After all, how many forensic evaluations can one complete before one starts to phone it in? It made me nervous at first, though. He was my only hope. If it weren’t for his strange fetish, I might have been done for. But it worked out in the end. I was happy to entertain his perversion. If mother-daughter issues turned him on, I could provide. Now my defense is in the bag: mental impairment, thus not criminally responsible.

Yes, I had to tweak the details of what happened. But I wasn’t going to be held responsible for something that was my mother’s fault. Besides, the first part of my story was true. My mum was entirely useless after my father died. John was part of a church that stepped in to help. As for the rest… I just gave Dr. Warren what he wanted.

John wasn’t the disciplinarian I described, and he never locked me in the basement or sexually assaulted me—heaven forbid!—but what he did was worse. He stole my mother. Then they fell hopelessly, disgustingly, in love. They married less than a year after my father died. And then, while my head was still spinning from all of this, they had a fucking baby.

From the moment Amy was conceived, she was more important than me. Mum rested constantly “for the baby.” She barely left the house. She started knitting for the baby… knitting! She made a bunch of soft animals and even knitted a life-size doll, adding Amy’s name to it after she was born. She started eating organic food—which was not a thing back then—while continuing to feed me fish fingers and whatever other rubbish she had in the freezer. And apart from me and John, she didn’t tell anyone that she was pregnant, suddenly superstitious that something would happen to her perfect, magical, second-chance child.

When the time came, she had a drug-free home birth rather than the epidural-assisted hospital birth she had with me. Worst of all, she gave birth to a daughter, making me entirely redundant.

“Aren’t you a darling girl?” Mum would say as she stood over the bassinet, gazing at her. “How I love you, darling girl.”

It made me sick.

One night, Mum and John left me to babysit for a few hours, which frankly wasn’t the greatest parenting choice, given that I was barely a teen. They’d made a big deal of it, saying, “Your big sister is babysitting,” to Amy a million times in a silly baby voice. We were all referred to in reference to our relationship with Amy by then. Amy’s mummy. Amy’s daddy. Amy’s big sister. As if we’d ceased to be anything else. As if we hadn’t existed before she came along.

Mum thought babysitting would be a good way for me to bond with Amy. I thought it would be a good chance for me to ignore her and watch TV. It might have been okay had she not kept crying. She cried until her little face was red and her legs were scrunched up against her belly. Not so cute now, are you, darling girl? I thought, as I peered down at her.

Did I mean to hurt her? Well… I won’t say it didn’t feel good to throw her against the wall. I won’t say it didn’t feel good to put an end to the crying. I won’t say it didn’t feel good to see Mum’s and John’s faces when they saw what I’d done.

Mum was the one who buried her. In secret—to “protect” me. She told John she couldn’t bear to lose two children. For God’s sake. I assumed she’d taken her to the woods or something, not buried her under the damn house! Then again, if she hadn’t buried her under the house, I never would have dreamed up this teen pregnancy story. Thank you, Mummy. Thank you for everything.