"Recently I pointed out that you now wore slavery as a uniform and not as a fancy dress costume. There is a deeper truth. You are a slave. In a previo...s life, you did not soil your hands with domestic work (as you might put it) but we have now stripped that cloak from you. You stand naked as you really are. Domestic work, any work we give you, is one hundred percent appropriate for you to do, because you are a slave and working on the instructions of their superiors is what slaves do. We have. ‘I didn’t hear you. You gave me quite a firght.’ ‘No, Mom, not Peter,’ I said. Peter was my Dad’s name. ‘It’s me. Mark. Your son.’ ‘Mark?’ she said, voice wavering. The look of confusion in her eyes almost made me want to weep. Mom was once a good looking woman, back in her youth. Before Dad. Now she looked tired. Not old, not really. Not like she was actually pushing fifty. She’d stopped dying her hair, and it was white now, and she’d gained weight, but she kept out of the sun and her olive. “Actually, that is what I want to talk to you about,” Dad said as he picked his teeth. He just finished devouring Seven’s roasted tit and cleaned his plate of juices.“Oh goody, Daddy is going to tell us you were adopted,” Betty giggled with Veronica.It was rare that this happened, but parents did have the right to send their kids to auction. It was usually something they tell kids to scare them into behaving and eating all their vegetables. If Dad had wanted to, he could have done that to any. “After he took her from me, as I’ve told you, they wanted me to assume the title of uncle, well-loved uncle was the way the woman phrased it. They would ‘allow’ me unlimited visitation time with my daughter was another of their bones—yippee-ay-oh. And the final straw: allowing me to share the walking of my daughter down the aisle when she married her young man. And the killer in that? It was clear to me that my daughter was okay with their plan. That one still rankles.”“Hmm, yes I understand,.