Chapter Nine Nora
The first time I ever dared to plan an escape, I was thirteen.
That week, my father’s fists had found my mother thrice.
Three times in seven days. The first was on Tuesday, over dinner.
She had salted the meat too much. The second was Thursday, because she breathed too loud while he was watching television.
The third was Saturday morning, and I never learned the reason.
Maybe there wasn’t one. Maybe he just woke up and needed somewhere to put his hands.
They found me twice. The first time, I was standing too close to the refrigerator when he opened it.
The door hit my shoulder, and when I stumbled back, his hand shot out and grabbed my arm.
He didn’t even look at me. His eyes were on the shelves, searching for something, while his fingers dug into the soft flesh above my elbow.
The second time, I sneezed. He backhanded me from the couch. I flew sideways, hit the coffee table, and lay on the floor while the TV played a jingle for laundry detergent.
They had even found the wall, leaving a crater in the plaster.
I stared at that crater afterward, ran my fingers over the rough edges, and felt the give of the broken drywall.
The house had a wound now. The same way my mother had wounds.
The same way I had wounds. The walls and the women, all bleeding together.
I remember lying on the thin mattress that night, my body aching in places I had stopped naming. The springs poked through the fabric. The pillow was flat and smelled of sweat and something sour. My shoulder throbbed where he had grabbed me. My cheek was swollen where his hand had landed.
A single, clear thought cut through the fog of fear:
I can’t do this anymore. I can’t breathe in this house. I need to get out.
The thought was terrifying. The thought was liberating. I lay there in the dark, holding it, turning it over, letting it become real.
The next morning, I found my mother in the kitchen.
She was standing at the sink, her back to me, her hands submerged in soapy water. The bruise on her arm was the colour of a plum, deep purple at the center, fading to yellow at the edges. She had not bothered to cover it. There was no point. There was no one to see it except us.
I grabbed her wrist. Her bones felt small and fragile under my fingers. “We have to leave.” My voice was a thread of sound. “We can go anywhere. I don’t care where. Please. We have to go.”
My small hands gripped hers, trying to pour all my desperation into her, trying to make her feel what I felt—the suffocation, the terror, the knowledge that if we stayed one more day, one more hour, one more minute, we would both disappear entirely.
“Please, come with me. We can go together.”
She just shook her head, her eyes hollow.
I had seen my mother’s eyes change over the years. When I was very young, they had been bright. Not happy, exactly—I do not think my mother had ever been happy—but alive. There had been a light behind them, a small flame that flickered but did not go out.
Over time, that flame had dimmed. The bruises had covered her skin, and the light had retreated, further and further, until one day I looked into her eyes and saw nothing but a mirror.
My own fear staring back at me.
“You don’t understand, Nora. The world out there is crueler. Here… at least we know the devil.”
I thought her fear had broken her. I thought she was too scared to leave, too beaten down to believe in anything better. I thought she had given up. I thought I was braver.
So that night, while the house groaned with their sleep—my father’s heavy snoring, my mother’s small, whistling breaths—I gathered my life.
It fit into a single bag. A few clothes.
Among them, a worn sweater. It had been my mother’s once.
She had given it to me on a cold night when I could not stop shivering, even under the blankets.
The sleeves were too long. The collar was stretched.
But it was warm, and it smelled like her, and I could not leave without it.
A broken comb, missing three teeth. And a small, heavy knot of coins, wrapped in a sock so they would not clink.
The coins. I had been saving them for months.
Some from errands—the change my mother gave me to buy milk, the few cents left over that I pocketed instead of returning.
The rest carefully skimmed from my father’s wallet, penny by penny, nickel by nickel, so the loss would look like carelessness, not theft.
I slung the bag over my shoulder. The strap bit into the bruise on my collarbone. I didn’t wince. I had learned not to wince.
And I walked out the door, into the dark, believing I was walking toward freedom. I didn’t allow myself a single glance back. I just walked.
For the first few blocks, it felt like freedom. The air was fresh. It tasted like possibility. The night sky felt endless, a dome of black stretching above me, pinpricked with stars I had never noticed before because I had never been allowed to look up.
But with every step, the world grew darker and more threatening.
The streets I knew—the four streets of my world, the ones I had memorized from the stoop—gave way to streets I did not recognize. The houses changed. The fences changed. The trees changed. Everything was unfamiliar, and unfamiliarity was a language I did not speak.
Men clustered on corners, their eyes tracking my progress with a slow, predatory interest. I felt their gazes like fingers on my skin.
I pulled my sweater tighter, though the night was not cold enough for it.
I walked faster. I crossed the street to avoid them.
They laughed. The sound followed me, low and knowing, like they had seen a thousand girls like me walking alone in the dark and knew exactly how the story ended.
A car crawled beside me, its pace matching mine. The engine idled. The windows were tinted. I could not see inside. The car stayed with me for half a block, then a full block, then two blocks. I stopped walking. The car stopped. When I moved again, it followed.
My heart was a fist pounding against my ribs. Then, without warning, the car sped away, the tires squealing, and a laugh—a man’s laugh, low and ugly—floated back to me through the open window. I felt that laugh in my bones. It settled there, alongside the cold and the hunger and the fear.
Then the hunger came. A sharp, gnawing emptiness I had not planned for. I had planned for the door, for the walk, for the act of leaving. I had not planned for food.
I had thought that leaving was enough. I had thought that the hard part was walking out the door. But the hard part was everything that came after.
I was a child playing at adulthood, and the world was about to teach me a lesson I did not want to learn.
The town became a maze. Alleys betrayed me, leading to brick walls or opening onto roaring highways. I didn’t know which turns to take, which paths to avoid.
Within an hour, I was utterly lost.
Every shadow seemed to hold a threat, every noise—a shout, a car door slamming, footsteps behind me—felt like a prelude to an attack. I jumped at every sound. I flinched at every movement. My body was vibrating with a fear so intense that I could not tell where my skin ended and the night began.
By the time the sky began to pale, my legs were trembling from exhaustion and fear. I curled up behind a dumpster, clutching my bag to my chest, swallowing my sobs because sound made me a target.
My mother’s words echoed in my mind, no longer a sign of weakness, but a terrible, hard-won truth: Inside, we know the rules. Outside… it’s a different kind of danger.
And I finally understood.
Inside that house, the terror had a structure. I knew the rhythm of his rage, the places to hide, the art of making myself invisible. The violence was a storm, but I had learned to read the weather.
Inside, I was a prisoner. But I was a prisoner who knew the layout of the prison. The guard’s schedule. The blind spots in the cameras. The locks that were loose and the doors that did not close all the way.
But out here…
Out here was pure, unpredictable chaos.
No patterns to memorize. No shelter to rely on. No walls, just a vast, terrifying openness where anything could happen.
So, before the sun could fully expose my failure, I turned back.
I walked until the streets began to shrink back into a world I recognized. Until I saw the familiar, peeling blue of our front gate.
I slipped inside. They were still asleep. My father’s snores rumbled from the bedroom. My mother’s breathing was soft and even. The house had not missed me. The house had not noticed that I was gone.
I crawled back onto my thin mattress and pressed my face into the pillow, muffling the tears of shame and defeat.
My mother was right.
A known hell is safer than an unknown one.
I had tested the unknown, and it had rejected me. It had shown me its teeth. It had sent me running back to the only shelter I had ever known, even if that shelter had fists.
After that night, I stopped planning.
I stopped hoping for a different life.
I stopped believing in a future.
The bag stayed under my mattress. The coins stayed in their sock. The comb stayed broken.
I did not take them out again. I did not add to them. I did not plan another escape.
My only goal was to endure.
Now, for the first time in over a decade, I am making a plan.
A plan for myself.
It is terrifying.
It is thrilling.
It is real.
Maeve told me to come to the café early tomorrow.
She offered to pick me up, but I refused; I cannot let this world touch that one.
The car is Julian’s. The driver reports to Julian.
If Maeve’s car pulls into the driveway, if a neighbor sees, if a word gets back to him—I cannot risk it.
The two worlds must stay separate. The wife and the woman cannot meet.