I can’t put my baby in a stroller.  There are no rattles or binkies in my mansion.  No cradle would ever hold her.  I named her Emily but no one would ever call her that.  She was the only good that ever came out of that man my parents auctioned me off to.

He was appalled that our daughter was going to have Down Syndrome, so he drank.  The perfectionist, millionaire broker could not be seen raising something that “ugly.”  So he drank a lot.  He drank until he got the nerve to ask me for an abortion.  He drank until he hit me when I said no, knocked me down and stomped on my stomach.  I shot him eight times.  They agreed I wasn’t guilty and I inherited everything.  I profited from my daughter’s murder.

It’s strange, I was once joyous of the hope that I placed on her.  She would have been everything to me but nothing to this world.  Would I have been enough for her?

Even though no one will ever accept what I do next, they won’t condemn me either.  They won’t wonder why I did what I did.  This is the story of my fall.  Where there was darkness, now it’s deeper.  This is my shadow.  Feel it.  Feel the absence that follows me.

They named me “clinically depressed,” “temporarily insane,” “suicidal.”  They named my shadow the “victim,” “the justification for my self-defense.”  I named her Emily.