A hand touches my arm.
I blink, snapped back to the sunlit terrace.
Gigi’s brow furrows. "Soph? You okay? You went kind of pale."
I clear my throat and fake a sip from my glass. "Just the heat. I think I skipped breakfast."
Izzy smirks. "Maybe you’re pregnant. It’s about time."
More giggles. More smiles. But I can’t laugh. Not with white still burning behind my eyes.
Pregnant. That's what Roberto wants. The last thing I want to do is bring a life into this world. Intohisworld. Even though there are moments when I wonder if I were pregnant, would he stop beating me? Would he stop using me like a whore? But those moments are fleeting; the fear of an innocent child being subjected to Roberto's… filth is unimaginable.
Thank God for Doc Brown—the only person in this world besides my father who knows the truth about Roberto—who comes at Roberto’s command every month to take my blood for a pregnancy test. Unfailingly, every third month, he gives me the shot that we both know will prevent said pregnancy.
"Dear child, I can get you out." He said last time, when he saw the bruises on my ass and hips.
"Where would I go?" I asked desolately.
"Anywhere but here," he answered.
I shook my head. Yes, I could go, I suppose, with his help. But then I would leave everything else behind. Not that there is much. Besides the girls, who are giving me the only sense of normalcy I have. It's not like I haven't thought about it. I could go. I could take my jewelry, pawn it, and just vanish. Work as a waitress somewhere, because I don't have any job experience or a college degree. I could live in a tiny space until they eventually found me. And they would. It wouldn't be just my enraged husband after me. My father and Angelo would be just as hot on my heels. They'd search the entire Earth for me. And never stop. Never.
No, I don't have any place to go. And anybody who helped me would be in danger too. I can't do that to anybody.
"I don't think so," I answer Izzy's statement. Not letting on that pregnancy is the last thing I want in this world.
"That's too bad, you're so good with kids," Gigi adds. "Are you still working at the shelter?"
Once a week, I go to a women’s shelter. Roberto treats it like a cosmic joke—thinks it makes him look magnanimous—but he lets me go. Maybe he likes the optics of me among people more broken than I am. Maybe he thinks it’s charity, photos, and a feather in his cap. Whatever. He doesn’t know what it actually does for me.
I don’t go for the women. Honestly, I wouldn’t know what to say to them. What could I possibly offer? I go for the children. For two hours each week, I get to besomeone else: a girl with a guitar who shows up with a stack of instruments and terrible jokes, who teaches beats and scales and the weird pop songs they hum under their breath. I bring the instruments; I bring the money to replace the busted keyboards and the ripped beanbags—Roberto’s money, charged on some account he won’t notice. I outfit the playroom with cheap lights, a paint-splattered easel, and a mess of art supplies. I sign the receipts underdonation. To him, it’s vanity, a charitable photo op. To me, it’s oxygen.
There’s a counselor there—Clara—who thinks she’s listening to me talk about the kids. She leans in when I mention a boy who won’t speak, or a girl who draws too many walls, and she says the right things, “Keep offering him the music,” “Let her choose the color.” She writes notes, nods, and reads aloud the sort of clinical lines people say when they want to mean something kind. Most of it is the sort of language that makes adults feel like they’re doing something useful.
But sometimes, I’m not talking about them at all.
One afternoon, Clara sits me down for astaff check-in, as she calls it, all soft eyes and clipboard, and shows me a breathing exercise like she’s teaching a child to tie their shoes.
“Box breath,” she says, drawing an invisible square in the air. “In for four, hold for four, out for four, hold for four. It grounds the nervous system.” She demonstrates, like she’s sending a message through the skin: slow, steady, deliberate.
She teaches me the grounding trick next: name five things you can see, four you can touch, three you can hear, two you can smell, and one you can taste. She watches my face while I do it, thinking I’m helping a kid with an earthquake of feelings. She hands me a cheap bracelet—one of those threaded ones the shelter kids make—and says, “When you feel small, snap this and count to ten.”
I nod and smile and let her tuck the bracelet into the pocket of my cardigan like it’s for a child. When she leaves, I hold it in my palm and feel something like permission.
I use the exercises in private. At home, when Angelo’s words loop in my head and Roberto’s boot is a drum on the floor above, I breathe the box breath until the edges of panic blur. In the shower, I run the grounding list through my mind—concrete things to press me back into my body: the grain of the tile, the rhythm of the water, the metallic scent of the soap. I snap the thread bracelet once when I need the sharp, ridiculous proof that my skin exists.
Clara thinks she’s teaching coping to little bodies who’ve been smashed too young. She has no idea that the kidwho bangs his fist and hidesis sometimes me, or that when she suggests offering him the drum,giving him two minutes to pound and then a minute to breathe, she’s describing the only kind of mercy I’ll ever let myself have. She doesn’t know that I practice the breathing in my car, that I mouth thefive senses list before a party they force me to attend, that the bracelet sits under my sleeve like contraband.
It would be easy to hate her for not knowing. Instead, I’m grateful. Her tools are small and ordinary; they aren’t miracles, but they keep me functional.
These little tricks keep the part of me that the world uses from collapsing. Clara’s mouth says it’s for them—and maybe it is—but in the quiet between her sentences, she’s given me a way to answer when my own chest is too loud.
If anyone asked, I’d tell them the shelter work is my way of giving back, when the truth is, it's my sanctuary. The kids pull me out of myself more effectively than any drink ever could. I know that alcohol is a hollow friend; it makes you forget for a little while, and it can make you reckless in ways that always demand payback. My time at the shelter is the only reason I don’t slide into something worse. I can’t be wasted while working with them. Children need someone awake. They need someone steady. They need me, and that tiny demand is the leash that keeps me from falling in on myself.
Sometimes, late at night, I look at the receipts I’ve signed with Roberto’s card, and it feels like stealing. But then I remember the smile on the boy who finally sang in front of the group, the way his chest opened up like a door that’s been battered long enough to latch. That’s worth the risk. That’s worth the quiet, deliberate theft of money from a man who has too much of it.
Roberto thinks he’s humoring me. He doesn’t notice the way I keep my hands steady when I place another order for bunk beds or send another invoice for a counselor. He doesn’t know that the shelter has become my project, my small, stubborn rebellion. If the family ever figures it out, they’ll call it a phase or an eccentricity or an absurdity. They won’t see that it’s the only place that still believes I'm allowed to be gentle.
