Arnold’s face contorts with rage, his hand releasing Liam’s wrist only to connect with his jaw in a vicious punch. Liam stumbles back, blood trickling from the corner of his mouth.
“You always did have a smart mouth,” Arnold snarls, advancing on him again.
“Stop!” I shout, launching myself at Arnold, my hands clawing at his arm. “Leave him alone!”
He turns on me, his eyes blazing with fury. “I told you to stay out of this.”
He shoves me, hard.
I fly backward, my body crashing into the counter with a sickening thud. Pain explodes in my head, white-hot and blinding. The world spins, the sounds of the café fading into a distant buzz.
“Millie!” Liam’s voice cuts through the haze, and then he’s there, his hands on my face, his eyes wide with panic. “Millie, are you okay? Talk to me.”
I try to answer, but the words won’t come. My head throbs, a relentless, pounding beat that makes me want to vomit.
Liam turns. “You’re going to pay for this.”
He launches himself at his father, his fists flying. The fight is brutal, the sound of flesh hitting flesh echoing in the small café. Aunt Dee is screaming, Maren is crying, and Jessica is on the phone with the police, her voice high and frantic.
I try to get up, to help, but my body won’t cooperate. The room tilts, the colors blurring together. I can hear Liam’s ragged breaths, Arnold’s grunts of pain, the sickening crunch of bone on bone.
“Stop,” I shout, but the word is lost in the commotion.
Liam has Arnold pinned against the wall, his forearm pressed against his father’s throat.
“You’re never coming back,” he growls, his face inches from Arnold’s. “You’re never going to hurt anyone in this family again.”
Liam
Arnold’s face turns red, then purple, but his eyes still hold that cruel amusement that’s haunted my nightmares since childhood.
He struggles against me, his hands clawing at my arm, but I’m stronger now. I’m not the six-year-old boy who watched in terror as he backhanded my mother across the kitchen. I’m not the teenager who believed his lies about change and sobriety. I’m not the young man whose arm he snapped like a twig when I tried to protect my mother.
The memories flood my mind, vivid as if they happened yesterday.
Six years old. The smell of cheap whiskey and stale cigarettes. My mother’s cries as my father’s hand connects with her cheek. The crash of dishes hitting the floor. Me hiding under the kitchen table, my hands over my ears, trying to block out the sounds.
“Liam, run,” my mother whispered later that night, packing a small bag while he slept off his drunken rage. “We need to go somewhere he can’t find us.”
We ran to Driftwood Cove, to Aunt Dee’s house, to a new life without him. For years, we were safe. We were happy.
Then, after high school, my mother told me he was back. That he wanted to reconcile. That he’d changed.
“He has a house now, Liam,” she said, her eyes filled with something I mistook for hope. “He’s done with drinking. He wants to be a father again.”
I’d been skeptical, but she’d been so desperate to believe. So we went. The house was huge, sprawling, with a view of the ocean. He’d seemed different—sober, apologetic, full of promises about the future.
For a few months, it was almost like having a real family. Almost.
Then he came home drunk one night. The cycle started again. The shouting, the breaking things, the fear in my mother’s eyes. Until the night I tried to stop him from hitting her. Until I heard the sickening crack of my own bone breaking.
“I told you what would happen,” he sneered as I lay on the floor, cradling my arm, the pain blinding. “Don’t ever get in my way again.”
We escaped again to Aunt Dee’s, where she helped us get the restraining order. When we returned to Driftwood, my mother promised we’d be safe here. That he’d never hurt us again.
But here he is. In our café. In our town. In our lives.
“Get off me,” Arnold chokes out, bringing me back to the present. His face is turning an alarming shade of purple.
