My Mother Saved Her First Love and Buried Her Own Son

On the day of my baby sister's christening, our father carried her out himself to fetch the wine for the table, and on the road they were caught in a chain of cars that folded into one another like crushed tin.

If they had only reached help in time, both of them would have lived.

But my mother, a woman who could buy the loyalty of half the city, pulled away every man who might have saved them. All because her first love had complained that the smell of blood turned his stomach, and she wanted the doctors tending the scrape on his hand instead, a cut less than an inch long.