When I was twenty-nine, Thomas Ainsworth was my savior. By the time I turned thirty, he was my keeper.

I grew up under a grand delusion.

As a child, I pretended that I was a paper princess, hidden in a tower, awaiting my prince. Being with me came at an impossible price though, because I was kept by a wicked witch, someone who called herself my mother. I was a doomed Rapunzel, forgotten by the world.

All my life, I’d been a kept woman.

Kept in the cellar while my mother entertained foul men of all shapes and sizes, sometimes for hours or all night long.

Kept in the closet while my mother sucked her boyfriend’s cock.

Kept in the garage while my mother laundered bloody sheets and soiled blankets. While she scrubbed the walls and took out the trash.

My mother said she was born to serve. A born listener. A follower. Chosen for breeding. Hand-picked for pleasure. She had voluptuous curves where I had straight lines. She had large, pillowy double D’s where I had budding B’s. She knew how to change up her makeup depending on the occasion. Darker liners and sparkly eyeshadows for her many male friends, and lighter pastels for her ‘honey’— the man who paid our bills and bought us groceries. Mother was a shapeshifting chameleon.

My mother taught me how to be the perfect kept woman, too. While puberty made my physical appearance more womanly, Mother was the one who taught me how to behave like a proper woman. Mom taught me how to beg for cock, but not seem too desperate doing it. She passed down her trade, and I inherited a set of skills that she said would help me get ahead in life. By the time I turned sixteen, Mom had taught me how to lasso men like horny steeds, and how to tie them down so they’d never leave me. She proudly informed me that the only reason we had a roof over our heads and food in our bellies was because her mother (my Gran) had taught her how to be a good kept woman. When Mom’s belly had grown huge because I lay nestled within her, her honey, a man named Graham Parker, had no choice but to support us. Many years later, the year I turned thirteen, Graham left us to be with his real family in Florida. So Mom had to go out again and find another man who would keep her.

Mom OD’d two weeks after my sixteenth birthday. At least, that’s what the official records showed. Truth was, someone might’ve been there watching her while she took her last, pitiful breath. Someone with short brown hair and size twelve shoes. But no one wanted to track down a junkie’s deadbeat boyfriend. No one wanted to waste tax dollars on a seemingly open and shut case. So they took the easy route, labeled it as a heroin overdose, and she was cremated four days later. Mom had been eight weeks pregnant. I might’ve had a sibling.

I was placed in a group home, then fostered by a lovely Australian couple, who, for financial reasons, could no longer foster me after the first year. By then, I was seventeen, almost eighteen, and I was about to age out. So I ran away instead and did what my Momma told me. I put my skills to work; the only skills I had. And cash came to me from all sorts of unlikely places. Bus stops. Behind the bowling alley. Train station bathrooms. And it came in heaping piles. So much I didn’t know what to do with it all.

A regular college grad made eleven bucks an hour pushing papers. I made three hundred bucks a day off five to six clients. And since I never paid a dime in taxes, I did pretty well for myself. But one day, I woke up at twenty-nine and felt exhausted. With the money had come black eyes, gonorrhea, bloody piss, and broken teeth. I was sick of the Johns and their filthy dicks. The pathetic, condom-clad, Viagra-fueled cocks that chafed, the pubic hair that itched. I was sick of slimy tongues dancing over my mouth. Sick of greasy hair trailing over my body. Sour cigarette breath coughing down my throat. It was not the kind of life I wanted.

I wanted to be kept by a wealthy man. Someone with power. Someone who could protect me. So I did my research, and did it well, and I found him.

Thomas Ainsworth. Widower with a sixteen-year-old son. A respected senator. Graduated from Harvard. An upstanding, well-loved man. Someone lonely and powerful, who probably needed a feminine touch. My feminine touch. So for him, I would reinvent myself. I would become a proper woman; someone who deserved a man like him. To Thomas, I was Veronica Hawksworth. Born and bred in Illinois. Both parents died in a car crash when I was eight, so I was raised by a sickly grandmother. Went to college and got a degree in Visual Arts. Of course, none of this was real, but that didn’t matter.

It took three months of planning and surveying, then three more months of coaxing and teasing before Thomas was mine. He came with baggage: a teenage son left over from a previous marriage. But I didn’t mind. I’d play house if it meant I could live in one. A nice one at that. I dutifully fixed their meals, cleaned their—our—home, and played the wifely role to perfection. I’d finally done it. I could finally stop running. I only had to suck one cock now in order to stay alive, and it was a nice cock, belonging to a nice man, so I did so happily and with enthusiasm.

Everything was perfect until the day I saw Thomas as the man he truly was. Not a grieving widower, but a sadist. Not a confident, powerful politician, but a desperate old man drowning in pain, a coward quick to lash out against his son and strip away others’ humanity in order to feel good about himself. Thomas was a violent predator, and we were his prey. Thomas was a million times crueler than my own mother, and I needed to get away before I couldn’t. But escape carried harsh penalties, the worst of which meant certain death. After all, if I left Thomas, he’d do anything to make sure I was miserable for the rest of my life.

I needed a new plan, and quickly, so I switched allegiances. Thomas would get sloppy one day, and he’d get arrested. Then, I would have nothing. Be nothing. But if I was fast enough, I still had a chance with his son, Ryder. The one who stood to inherit everything if something bad happened to his father. Ryder was a good boy, but one so mistreated that it was almost impossible to coax him out of his shell. He cowered before his dad and slinked into a corner whenever Thomas came home. He was broken, but I wanted to mend him. Because if we could escape together, I still stood a chance. We could start over, somewhere new, and Ryder could keep me off the streets. I’d still be kept, and still be safe.

I thought it was a good plan, a solid plan.

Everything was going well. I played both of them.

The kept woman had become the master.

But I hadn’t counted on the hiccup: getting pregnant.

Worse still, I didn’t know which of them was the baby’s father.

* * *

Much later, when I’d learned about Ryder’s betrayal, how he’d accused me of raping him, I realized that he had been playing me as much as I him. I never thought he would’ve been capable of doing something so malicious to someone he said he loved. I was wrong. He never truly loved me.

Thomas said Ryder turned me in because he couldn’t stand seeing how big my belly was getting. Thomas said Ryder was jealous, and that his behavior stemmed from something called an Oedipus Complex. I believed my husband because I had no one else. Shortly after that, my lawyer convinced me to take a plea bargain. I spent five long years at Honoria Prison.

I gave birth to Orielle on a cold January day. I named her after this popular girl in the fifth grade who had the brightest golden hair. Orielle was my real family. She was my everything, and I couldn’t look after her from behind prison walls. So it was with great reluctance that I handed my baby over to her father (or at least, I hoped it was her father). Thomas said he would love Orielle with everything he had. He wept when he held her fragile, five pound eight-ounce body in his arms for the first time. Loud, blustery tears. Something I’d never seen in him before. I saw those big tears, and at the time I thought, he’d make a great father. He’d love her. Treasure her.

While I served my time, Thomas hired a nanny to look after our baby girl while he was at work. The Portuguese woman was named Amalia. Amalia was good to Orielle, and that made me feel a comfort I’d never known. At first, Thomas brought Orielle to see me every weekend, but as the years went by, he said that for Orielle’s sake, it was best not to bring her to a prison. Her young mind was very impressionable. So I agreed. The last time I saw her in prison was on her second birthday. Then, it had been three long years before I saw her again, an almost five-year-old girl who wore red suspenders and a long blonde braid down her back. At least she hadn’t inherited Ryder’s hair color, which would’ve been difficult to explain to Thomas, who was blond. Perhaps Orielle was really Thomas’ daughter anyway, which would’ve finally laid the matter to rest.

I thought we could be a family now. I’d done my time. Ryder was gone from our lives. We had a beautiful baby girl together.

Until…until one day, when Orielle was eleven, she came home with a bruised eye and told me that a boy at school punched her because her mother was a rapist whore. I was shocked to hear those words from her trembling lips, and shame rolled over my body like a dense fog. That hadn’t been the first incident either, she said. A few times, when she was eight, a group of girls bullied her because her mother was a sex offender who didn’t deserve to be called a mother at all.

Six months after the black eye, a petition was passed around the neighborhood and signed by almost everyone on our block. The consensus was that I needed to stake a sign on my front lawn warning the neighborhood that a registered sex offender lived there. It was already bad enough that I couldn’t be within two blocks of a school or library, or anywhere with minors. But now this, the ultimate humiliation? All because I made the mistake of sleeping with a seventeen-year-old who was a couple months shy of eighteen. We moved shortly after that for the second time that year.

Ryder had ruined my life, and I would never let him forget it. If I ever laid eyes on him again, I vowed to unleash the worst kind of punishment I could possibly muster and make him feel the way I did all those years ago.

One way or another, I would be vindicated.