Chapter Four Nora #2
My shin remembered the strike of his boot when I didn’t scramble out of the way fast enough.
I was eight. He was coming out of the bedroom in a rage about something—I never knew what, I never knew why, the reasons changed like weather—and I was standing in the hallway with my doll.
Just standing there. Just a girl with a doll.
His boot connected with my shin and I went down and the doll went flying and he stepped over me like I was a rug and kept walking.
I didn’t cry until I heard the front door slam.
Then I cried into the carpet. I picked up the doll.
One of its eyes had popped out. I kept that doll for years, one-eyed, because throwing it away felt like throwing away the only witness who understood.
The small of my back wore the echo of his palm from the night I spilled my milk. I was nine. My hand slipped. The glass tipped. The milk spread across the table like a slow white tide and then dripped onto his lap.
He didn’t yell. He didn’t even speak. He just stood up, and hit me so hard I flew off the chair.
I landed on the floor with my tailbone against the leg of the table and my head against the refrigerator.
I lay there for a long time, staring at the light under the freezer door, listening to him breathe.
From the floor, I saw my mother’s hands twitch in her lap. I saw her knuckles go white around her napkin. Her chair creaked—a tiny sound, a millimeter of movement—and my eyes found hers. I shook my head. Just once. Just enough. Don’t. Please don’t.
The last time she stepped between us, he hurled her into the hallway wall so hard the drywall cracked. She wore a sling for two weeks and told the neighbors she fell down the stairs.
Her hands let go of the napkin. They fell to her sides, limp, like birds that had forgotten how to fly.
She pressed her palms flat against her thighs and stared at the tablecloth.
The muscle in her jaw jumped once, twice, then went still.
Her chest rose and fell in these tiny, shallow breaths.
When he turned to look at her, she didn’t look back.
She just sat there, her head bowed, her hair falling across her face like a curtain she could hide behind.
Her finger traced a circle on the back of her other hand. Round and round. A prayer with no words. A mother drawing something on her own skin because she could not reach across the table and touch her daughter.
I was never his daughter. I was a thing he kept in the house.
A thing he remembered to wound when the mood took him.
A piece of furniture he kicked when he stubbed his toe.
A sound he liked to hear—the thud of my body hitting the floor, the sharp gasp I couldn’t always swallow, the small whimper that escaped sometimes before I could catch it and lock it away in the back of my throat with all the others.
Some nights the rage came. His face went red. His voice went sharp. I could see those hits coming from across the room. But the ones that scared me more—the ones I still feel in my sleep—came from nowhere. The night was long. The TV went to commercial. He needed to occupy his restless hands.
I would walk past the couch and his fingers would close around my wrist, holding me there just to feel me shake. Boredom settles into the bones. Boredom stays. Rage burns itself out and leaves you alone. Boredom keeps you close, keeps you still, keeps you because it can.
But the nights he locked me out were worse than any of it.
The concrete against my cheek had a taste.
Gritty. Metallic. Tiny stones stayed embedded in my skin long after I stood up.
The cold slipped between my ribs like a stranger climbing through a window.
It unpacked its bags. It told me it was never leaving.
And I believed it. I believed the cold more than I ever believed my mother when she said things would get better.
The cold never lied. The cold always came back.
Hunger was worse than the cold. Worse than being locked out.
My stomach caved inward, an empty hollow behind my belly button that just sat there whistling like a wind tunnel through an abandoned house.
I would press my palm flat against the concave of my belly and feel nothing pushing back.
Just skin. Just bone. Just the terrible empty space where a soul used to live.
Some nights I felt my own heartbeat pulsing deep in my gut, a wild little animal trapped in the dark, throwing itself against the walls of me. I laid on the stoop and counted the seconds between beats.
One. Two. Three.
I wondered how long a body could run on nothing. How long before the heart just stopped trying, stopped throwing itself at the walls, stopped believing there was any point in beating at all.
I was seven the first time I thought: I would rather he hit me than leave me out here.
Because a fist ends. A boot stops. A bruise fades to yellow, then green, then a pale brown that looks like old coffee, and then one morning you wake up and it’s gone and you almost forget which arm he grabbed.
The moment has a shape. A beginning, a middle, a thing you can point to afterward and say there, there it happened.
But the cold keeps going. The hunger keeps going. The door stays closed.
So I made a rule. A single, unbreakable law.
A roof over my head. Food in my stomach.
That was enough.
Everything else was a luxury.
If I had those two things, I would be okay.
Not happy. Not that strange, bright word I heard neighbourhood children use, a word that seemed to have the texture of blown glass and the colour of cotton candy.
Just okay. I wouldn’t need love. I wouldn’t need soft hands or gentle words or someone to hold me when I woke up shaking.
I would have heat. I would have bread. I would have a locked door between me and the night.
But being out there again—on that stoop, in that cold, with nothing but my thin arms wrapped around my thin knees and my own teeth chattering a rhythm I couldn’t stop—that was the monster I couldn’t look at.
That was the terror that still woke me up at three in the morning, sitting bolt upright, looking around frantically to make sure I hadn’t dreamed the roof.
My hand would find the wall. I would press my palm flat against it. I would feel the drywall, the paint, the solidness of it. And I would breathe. I would wait for my heart to stop throwing itself against the bars of my ribs.
When my parents arranged my marriage, I accepted without a sound.
I sat on the edge of my mother’s bed while she braided my hair for the last time, her fingers trembling, and I watched her face in the mirror—watched how her mouth kept opening and closing, wanting to warn me, wanting to tell me something, wanting to say it doesn’t have to be like it was for me. But she said nothing. Neither did I.
I married Julian and moved into a house where dinner appeared on the table each evening, the heater hummed through the winter like a living thing breathing warm air into the corners, and no one ever threw me out into the dark for the crime of existing.
Julian wasn’t cruel. His hands weren’t weapons. They held spoons. They turned pages of books. They rested on the table between us, open and still. His voice didn’t shatter me. It was even. It was low. It never rose above the volume of a question.
He was… safe.
It was the first safety I had ever known. The first time I went to sleep without mapping the exits. The first time I heard a door close and didn’t feel my heart spike into my throat. The first time I walked past a man sitting on a couch and his hand stayed where it was.
I would lie awake some nights and count my blessings like a miser counting gold, terrified that someone would notice I had them and take them away. A roof. Heat. A refrigerator that hummed and stayed full. A husband who didn’t raise his hand. It felt like stealing.
I never asked for anything more. It never occurred to me that there was anything more to ask for. More than safety? More than a roof? More than a full stomach and a warm bed and a man who didn’t hit? What would that even look like? I couldn’t picture it. I still can’t.
So when he cheated—when I saw him with another woman—my first feeling wasn’t betrayal.
It wasn’t heartbreak.
It wasn’t even anger.
My first, clear, calm thought was: At least he isn’t hitting me.
My second was: I still have a home.
The world was still, fundamentally, stable. The floor hadn’t opened. The sky hadn’t fallen. The rules I had built my entire life on—roof, food, no fists—were still intact. Nothing had changed. Nothing had been taken from me that I had ever truly believed I deserved to keep.
I have endured far worse. I have been locked out in December in a T-shirt. I have gone days without eating. I have had my own father look at me like I was a stain on the carpet. This—a husband who wanted someone else—this was nothing. This was a paper cut on a body that had been burned.
This, I knew how to survive. I had been surviving since I was six years old. I was very good at it. I was the best.
I turned around, went home, and started dinner—needing any task to pull me back into the routine.
Now, I wake. The same alarm. The same side of the bed. The same cold floor under my bare feet while Julian still sleeps, his back to me, his breath slow and even. I have always woken first.
I walk. To the bathroom. To the kitchen. The same steps I have taken every morning since I moved into this house. I could do them blindfolded. I have done them half-asleep, sick, shaking, numb.
I cook. Eggs the way he likes them. Runny yolks. Toast with the crusts cut off because he said so once, years ago, and I never forgot. I pack his lunch. The same container. The same napkin folded into the same triangle.
I clean. I wipe the counters. I sweep the floor. I pick up the crumbs he leaves by the toaster, the same crumbs he left yesterday, the same crumbs he will leave tomorrow. I scrub the sink until it shines.
The routine is a shield. I wrap it around myself every morning like a coat. The same things, every day, in the same order, at the same time. Nothing changes. Nothing surprises. Nothing reaches out from the dark to pull me down by my wrist.
I do not need love. I never did. Love was never on the table—just the tea, the biscuits, my parents across from Julian’s parents, everyone nodding.
Love was never the warm thing that filled the hollow in my belly.
Love was a word other people used. People with different childhoods.
People who hadn’t made a rule at seven years old.
I can endure any silence. I was born into silence. I was raised by silence. Silence is my mother tongue. I can sit across from Julian at dinner and say nothing. I can lie next to him in bed and say nothing. I can stand in the kitchen while he tells me about his day and say nothing. Just a nod.
Silence does not scare me. Silence is the only thing that has never hurt me. Silence has always kept me safe.
I will survive. As long as I am not standing outside a locked door. As long as the gnawing in my gut remains a memory. As long as his hands do not become my father’s. As long as he reaches for the salt and not for my wrist.
I will wake up. Walk. Cook. Pack his lunch. Clean. Sleep.
The same as yesterday.
The same as tomorrow.
The same as always.