I lift my gaze, but not to Father who I can’t bring myself to look at.
Instead, I find Mother.
Her balmed lips rub together, unease in the way her hands are threaded on her lap, and she stares out the corner of her eye at my father.
“Dray makes my life hell.” My voice trembles—and in a blink, a tear falls down my cheek. “For ten years, he has made sure I know just how much he hates me for what I am. He’s the reason I try to run away from the academy all the time. He’s done things… He has trapped me in closets, pushed me over in the hall, locked me out of the dormitories overnight…”
I turn my defeated gaze on Father’s stone face—
And my heart sinks at what I find.
I falter.
Father doesn’t look at me anymore. He has angled his cheek to me again, his gaze returned to the window and the passing countryside.
“Father?”
His jaw tenses.
In my peripherals, Mother’s head shakes ever so slightly—but it’s a warning I don’t heed.
“Father, please.” The tears invade my voice, wobbling it. “If you knew… If you saw what he’s like, what he’s really like… It sounds childish, I know, but itistorment, and it’s constant, and—”
“Enough.”
A dismissal.
Spoken plainly, quietly… but firm.
My gulp is audible.
My face is twisting with the ache in my heart. “You’re not listening to me, if you could just hear me out, then—”
Father’s shout bellows through the car, “Enough!”
The shout strikes me like a smack.
I jolt in the seat, suddenly rigid all over.
Father’s glare slides to me, slow, lethal. “You will do as your duty requires. Your petulance will have no place in the discussion of your arrangements, and no tantrum will change this. You have shamed our family too many times, girl.”
Mother’s hand touches her face, fingers pressed lightly to her lips, and her lashes shut.
Father is undeterred. “That all stops now.” His lips curl around his clenched teeth. “Am I clear?”
Instinct sinks me deeper in the seat.
I watch him warp through the mist of tears. But the shock is fading and the ache is mounting in my chest.
Breaths come choppy through my nostrils, as though I wrestle them. My mouth flattens, a trembling line, and I turn my wet cheek to him, to Oliver’s stony face, to Mother’s hidden one.
I watch the countryside drenched in mist pass the window for the rest of the ride.
2
The weather slows us down, and each agonising minute to pass is another minute I am fighting the sobs jutting in my chest.
I can’t stop the tears.
