My bedroom was a showroom for the blog, but I rarely slept there. My actual domain was the laundry room—a windowless concrete box smelling of bleach and mildew. When Thomas hosted his business partners, or Rebecca hosted her book club, I was shoved into the dark, the heavy door clicking shut, leaving me with the humming vibration of the washing machine for company.
I remembered the ‘silent days’. If I spoke out of turn, I was forbidden to make a sound for forty-eight hours. If I broke the silence, I was subjected to ‘floor meals’—forced to eat scraps of bread off the cold kitchen tile like a dog, while Thomas stood over me, his jaw clenched, mocking my tears. “I’ll send you back broken if you embarrass me,” he would hiss, his breath hot against my neck.
In public, it was worse. The constant vigilance. The sharp, agonizing pinches Rebecca would inflict under the table at restaurants if I answered a waitress’s question too eagerly. “Charity case,” she would mutter under her breath, maintaining a brilliant smile for the room.
Lying in the hospital bed, the fear threatened to pull me under. I remembered the exact incident that had led to my collapse. I had accidentally dropped one of Rebecca’s decorative ceramic bowls. It shattered, and so did her temper.
She hadn’t hit me. She had done something much worse. She had knelt down, her manicured nails digging into my shoulders, and leaned into my ear.
“If you keep causing problems, Ava,” she had whispered, a sickeningly sweet smile on her lips, “I am going to make everyone believe you ran away. I’ll pack a little bag, leave the back door open, and you’ll just be gone. And trust me… nobody is going to look hard for a girl like you.”
That threat had played on a loop in my fevered brain for days, leading directly to my plea to Dr. Grant.
The hospital door opened, pulling me from the memory. A woman with kind eyes and a badge reading Karen Holloway, Child Protective Services walked in. Trailing right behind her was a woman in a sharp blazer, her expression unreadable and hard. Detective Erin Walsh.
