“My sister pushed my daughter to the floor and sneered, ‘Get up yourself, what good is it to be weak?’ My mother even encouraged her, ‘You learn from your mistakes.’ But when the girl got up… her knee made a dry, cracking sound.”

---

The Harrington family mansion sat isolated on a hill, surrounded by ancient oak trees. Inside, everything exuded a chilling perfection, from the marble floors to the neatly hung family portraits. But the coldest place of all was the gymnasium in the basement – ​​where my sister, Sarah, was “training” my daughter, Lily.

I stood at the door, my hand gripping the wooden frame, my heart pounding. I was a single mother, recently recovering from alcohol addiction and trying to regain custody of my child. The court had placed Lily in the temporary care of my mother and Sarah for the past six months. Today was the first day I was allowed unsupervised visits.

“Again!” Sarah yelled. She was once an Olympic athlete, but an injury ended her career. Now, she was pouring all that insane ambition into her skinny seven-year-old niece.

Lily, in her tight-fitting workout clothes, was standing on a low balance beam. She was trembling, sweat dripping from her forehead.

“Aunt Sarah, I’m tired…” Lily whispered.

“Tired is the excuse of a failure!” Sarah snapped. She stepped forward without warning and shoved Lily hard in the shoulder.

Lily stumbled. She couldn’t grab onto anything. She fell, crashing onto the thin carpet on the hard wooden floor. A hard fall, the sound of her body hitting the floor echoing loudly.

I screamed, intending to rush in. But my mother – Evelyn – stood blocking the doorway, her hand gripping my shoulder. She watched the scene with an indifferent, even satisfied expression.

Sarah looked down at her niece sprawled on the floor, sneering:

“Get up yourself, what good is weakness?”

I struggled free from my mother’s grip. “What the hell are you doing? She’s only seven years old!”

My mother tightened her grip on my hand, her fingernails digging into my flesh, causing excruciating pain. She turned and spoke into the room, her voice calm, as if she were giving a moral lesson:

“You must learn from your mistakes.”

I thought she was talking to Lily. That she needed to learn to balance. But her gaze was fixed on Sarah. A look full of meaning that I didn’t understand at the time.

Lily lay still for a few seconds. Then she began to move. She braced herself against the floor, trying to stand up as her aunt commanded.

And that’s when the sound rang out.

As Lily shifted her weight onto her left leg to stand upright… her knee made a dry, cracking sound.

The sound was so loud it echoed through the large room. It was like a dry twig snapping in half. Lily’s knee bent backward at an unnatural angle, her kneecap dislocated.

I screamed, pushing my mother aside and rushing to my daughter’s side.

“Lily! Oh my God!” I knelt down, my hands trembling, afraid to touch her deformed leg. “Call 911! Sarah, call an ambulance! You broke her leg!”

But Sarah didn’t call. She recoiled, her face pale. Not from remorse. But from fear. She stared at Lily, stammering, “She… she did it again.”

I turned to look at my daughter, expecting a scream, a cry of pain. An injury like this could make an adult faint from the pain.

But Lily didn’t cry.

She sat there, looking down at her broken leg. Her face was as still as a lake. Her large, round blue eyes held no tears. She tilted her head, curiously observing the bone protruding under her skin as if it were a broken toy, not her own body.

Then, to my utter horror, Lily used her tiny hands to grasp her calf and thigh.

Click. Crack.

She straightened her knee.

She bent her leg, pushing her kneecap back into place.

Still no sound. No sign of pain. Only soft breathing.

After “fixing” her leg, Lily looked up at me. In an instant, those lifeless eyes changed. She blinked, and tears began to stream down her face. Her mouth contorted.

“Mommy… it hurts so much…” Lily sobbed, throwing herself into my arms. “Aunt Sarah pushed me… She broke my leg…”

I held her tightly, my head spinning. What had just happened? I had seen her straighten her own bone without flinching. But now she was crying like a normal child.

“You’re a monster…” Sarah whispered, backing away against the wall.

“Shut up!” I yelled, scooping Lily up. “I’m taking my child away. I’m suing you. You’re a bunch of sick child abusers!”

My mother stood in the door, her face no longer the proud, cold expression it once had. She looked ten years older, her eyes filled with despair.

“Jane,” she called my name. “Don’t take her. You don’t understand. You don’t know what she is.”

“She’s my daughter!” I screamed at her and stormed out the door.

I put Lily in the back seat of the car, buckled her seatbelt, and sped away, leaving the hellish mansion behind.

I drove straight to Stamford Hospital, but not for emergency treatment. Strangely, Lily’s leg was moving normally. She said “it hurts less” and fell asleep in the back seat.

Suspicion gnawed at my mind. The image of Lily calmly cracking her knuckles haunted me. I needed answers first.

When I called the police…

I remembered Dr. Aris – the Harrington family’s longtime family doctor. He had a private practice nearby.

I left Lily asleep in the car (locked securely) and stormed into Dr. Aris’s clinic. He was old, nearing retirement. When he saw me, he sighed as if he’d been waiting for this moment for a long time.

“You saw it, didn’t you, Jane?” he asked as soon as I opened my mouth.

“What’s wrong with her, doctor? Why didn’t she cry when she broke her bone?”

Dr. Aris opened a locked filing cabinet and pulled out a thick stack of medical records under Lily Harrington’s name.

“She has an extremely rare genetic syndrome: CIPA (Congenital Insensitivity to Pain with Anhidrosis). She’s congenitally insensitive to pain and doesn’t sweat.”

I was stunned. “She… doesn’t feel pain?”

“Not at all,” he shook his head. “It could break bones, get burned, or bite off its own tongue without feeling anything. That’s why Sarah has to train it so harshly. Not to be an athlete. But to teach it how to move safely. If its muscles aren’t strong enough to hold its joints, it will cripple itself because it won’t have a pain reflex to stop.”

Tears welled up in my eyes. “So… Sarah and Mom are just trying to help it?”

“That’s only part of the story,” Dr. Aris said, his voice low and filled with fear. “CIPA makes it immune to physical pain. But there’s something else… far more dangerous.”

He turned to the next page. X-ray images. But not of Lily.

They were of Sarah. Of my mother. Of the Golden Retriever that drowned last year.

“She’s also been diagnosed with Antisocial Personality Disorder (Psychopathy). She has no empathy, Jane. She doesn’t feel pain, so she doesn’t understand the pain of others.”

I picked up the photos.

Sarah’s hand had a broken finger.

The burns on my mother’s back.

The dog had rocks tied to its leg.

“She learns to mimic emotions,” Dr. Aris said, trembling. “She observes people’s reactions to know when to cry, when to laugh. She hurts herself and others to see the reaction. The fall today… Sarah told me last week. Lily kept deliberately dislocating her knee to taunt Sarah. Sarah pushed her not out of malice, but because Sarah was trying to prevent her from jumping from the high bar. Sarah pushed her onto the mat to save her, but Lily deliberately broke her own leg upon landing.”

“Why?” I whispered.

“To blame Sarah. To make you see. To make you take her away.”

My phone vibrated. A message from my mother:

“Jane, please don’t believe her. Check her jacket pockets. Don’t let her near a knife or fire.”

I looked out the clinic window.

My car was still parked there.

But the back seat was empty.

The car door was wide open.

Chapter 3: The Doll’s Game

I rushed out to the parking lot, shouting my daughter’s name in panic. It was pitch black. The area was deserted.

“Lily! Where’s Lily!”

A giggle came from behind the building.

I ran around to the back. There was an abandoned construction site.

Lily was standing on the edge of a deep foundation pit, full of protruding steel bars. She walked along the edge of the pit, limping because of her broken leg, but her face was radiant with delight.

“Mom, look at me!” Lily shrieked, spreading her arms like a circus performer.

“Lily! Stop! It’s dangerous!” I slowly approached, my heart pounding.

“Are you scared, Mom?” Lily tilted her head. “Why is everyone so scared? It doesn’t hurt.”

“My love, come here to me. I’m sorry for leaving you alone.”

“You didn’t leave me,” Lily smiled, an innocent smile, but her eyes were as dark as an abyss. “You saved me from Grandma and Aunt Sarah. They’re so annoying. They make me practice over and over again. They won’t let me play with knives. They hid all the lighters.”

She pulled something out of her coat pocket.

It was my dad’s Zippo lighter.

“I stole this before I left,” Lily whispered. She lit it. The flame danced in her eyes.

“What are you going to do?” I cried, pleading.

“I want to see this,” Lily said, and to my horror, she brought the flame close to her hand.

Her flesh began to sizzle. A burning smell filled the air.

But Lily didn’t pull her hand away. She gazed intently at the spreading burn, a mesmerizing smile on her lips.

“It’s beautiful, Mom.”

“NO!”

I lunged forward, grabbed her hand, and knocked the lighter away.

Lily turned to look at me. The smile vanished. Instead, there was a chilling coldness – exactly like the look she’d given my broken leg earlier that afternoon.

“You’ve ruined the game,” she said.

And then, she pushed me.

A sudden, forceful push from a seven-year-old.

But she didn’t push me away.

She pushed me toward the pit filled with iron spikes.

I slipped and fell backward.

In that moment of impact, I saw Lily’s face.

She wasn’t smiling. It wasn’t angry either. It was just observing. Like a scientist observing a white mouse caught in a trap.

THUMP.

I fell into a pile of damp sand at the bottom of the pit. Luckily, I didn’t fall on the iron bars. But the 3-meter drop made my ankle ache terribly. I broke my leg.

I lay there, groaning in pain. I looked up at the mouth of the pit.

Lily was standing there, looking down. Her tiny shadow was silhouetted against the night sky.

“Mom, does it hurt?” Lily called down, her voice full of curiosity.

“Help me… Lily… call someone to help me…”

“Cry out loud,” Lily said. “Grandma cried a lot when I pushed her down the stairs. Aunt Sarah cried too when I dropped the hairdryer in her bathtub.”

I was speechless.

Those accidents… My mom fell down the stairs last year. Sarah almost died from an electric shock last month.

None of them were accidents.

“Scream louder,” Lily continued, picking up a brick. “Let’s see if you’re like them.”

She dropped the brick.

The brick grazed my shoulder.

“Lily! Stop!”

The siren of a police car blared in the distance. Sarah and my mom had called the police as soon as I left. They didn’t call to arrest me. They called to save me.

Lily heard the siren. She clicked her tongue in disappointment.

“Playtime’s over.”

The little girl sat down on the ground, right at the edge of the hole.

And in an instant, she began to wail.

A heart-wrenching, agonizing cry, just like that of an abandoned child.

“HELP MY MOTHER! SHE FELL! HU HU HU!”

When the police and their flashlights shone on her, they saw a poor 7-year-old girl, limping, crying and pointing down at the hole where her “careless” mother had fallen.

They pulled me up. They comforted Lily.

“What a good girl, so brave,” the police officer said, lifting Lily up.

Lily rested her head on the officer’s shoulder, wrapping her arms around his neck.

Over his shoulder, Lily looked at me lying on the stretcher.

She narrowed her eyes, and a slight smile played on her lips.

A triumphant smile.

My mother’s words from that afternoon echoed in my head, now carrying a completely different meaning.

“You must learn from your mistakes.”

Sarah and my mother’s biggest mistake was trying to control that monster.

And my mistake… was letting it go.

As the ambulance rolled away, I saw Lily’s tiny hand reaching into the holster of the police officer carrying her.

Those tiny fingers, oblivious to pain, were touching the safety catch.