“Oh, I didn’t know you’d moved in with them. That’s great, right? They’re taking care of you?”
The silence that follows my lack of response tells him everything.
“What happened?” His voice goes cold. “Tell me everything.”
I do. When I finish, I can hear him breathing hard on the other end of the line, fury barely contained.
“I’m going to pull his financial records,” Vincent says. “Every account, every investment, every dollar. If he’s been lying to you, I’ll find it. And Loretta—I’m coming tomorrow. Whatever you need, whatever it takes, I’m there.”
By the time I hang up from the third call, I can hear their car pulling back into the driveway. Sloan’s laughter echoes through the garage, high and carefree. Deacon’s deeper voice rumbles underneath, relaxed and happy. They sound like people without a care in the world, people who just enjoyed an excellent meal and fine wine, people who have no idea that the foundation of their comfortable life is about to crack wide open.
I look at my reflection in the mirror above the dresser. The handprint on my cheek is vivid and unmistakable, red and swelling, the outline of Deacon’s fingers clearly visible against my pale skin. By tomorrow it will be purple. By the day after, it will be that sickly yellow-green color of a healing bruise.
I smile at my reflection. It’s not a happy smile. It’s the smile of someone who has been pushed too far and is finally pushing back.
Let them laugh tonight. Let them think I’m broken and defeated. Let them believe they can treat me however they want because I have nowhere to go and no power to fight back.
Tomorrow morning, they’re going to learn different.
How I Got Here
To understand how I got here—to this cold guest room in this showcase house, to the moment my own son struck me—you have to understand who I was before, and what I gave up to get him here.
I was seventeen years old when I met Jimmy Patterson. He was twenty-two, worked construction around Columbus, and had the kind of dangerous charm that makes teenage girls stupid. He had a crooked smile and broad shoulders and promises that sounded like poetry when you’re too young to know better. He told me I was beautiful. He told me we’d have a life together. He told me everything I wanted to hear.
I got pregnant three months after we married in a courthouse ceremony with two witnesses pulled in from the hallway. Jimmy celebrated the news by going to the bar with his friends and coming home at three in the morning, smelling like beer and making excuses I pretended to believe.
Deacon was born on a Tuesday afternoon in March, seven pounds four ounces of perfect, screaming, needy life. Jimmy showed up at the hospital six hours late, his breath still sour with alcohol, his eyes bloodshot, his apologies as empty as always. But when he held Deacon for the first time, something in his face softened, and I thought maybe—just maybe—fatherhood would change him.
It didn’t.
We lived in a cramped two-bedroom apartment on Columbus’s east side, the kind of building where the walls were so thin you could hear every argument from the neighbors, where sirens wailed past our windows most nights, where the hallway always smelled like cooking grease and old carpet. But it was ours. It was home.
When Deacon was six months old and I couldn’t stretch Jimmy’s paychecks any further because too much of the money went to the bar instead of our bills, I got a job at Morrison Textile Factory. Second shift, four to midnight, five days a week. Jimmy promised he’d watch the baby. He promised he’d be responsible.
Most nights I came home to find Deacon screaming in his crib, diaper heavy and soaked through, bottle empty for hours, Jimmy passed out drunk on the couch with the television blaring static because the station had gone off the air.
I worked forty hours a week, then fifty, then sixty when overtime was available and I was desperate enough to take it. My feet swelled in my steel-toed work boots until I could barely get them off at the end of my shift. My hands cracked and bled from the industrial cleaning chemicals we used. My lungs filled slowly with cotton fibers and the constant haze of secondhand smoke in the break room, where dozens of workers lit up during every fifteen-minute break, the smoke so thick you could barely see across the room.
The factory paid barely above minimum wage, but it was steady work and they didn’t ask questions and they let you pick up extra shifts if you were willing to destroy your body for a few more dollars.
I started keeping coffee cans in the back of my bedroom closet, hidden behind winter coats and boxes of outgrown baby clothes I couldn’t bring myself to donate. Every payday, after I paid the rent and utilities and bought groceries and diapers, I slid whatever was left into those cans. Some weeks it was twenty dollars. Some weeks it was ten. Some weeks it was five crumpled bills and a handful of coins.
I called it my emergency fund at first. Then I started calling it Deacon’s future.
