She once went to them for help, and I remember my grandparents seated in their living room, their faces cold as she tried to explain.He’s your son, my mother had said, her voice trembling.He hits me. He hits her.My grandfather looked at her with an expression between pity and contempt.He’s always been so high-spirited, he had said.You must know how to manage him by now.
My parents met young. He swept her off her feet with love, comfort, and promises of a better future.
My mother wasn’t from this world. She was a woman built from the spaces between things. A ghost in the system, an orphan without a penny to her name, hopping from foster home to foster home—until she was old enough to get rid of. It was a world of borrowed beds and the smell of someone else’s laundry. She was moved like a piece of unwanted furniture, traded between families.
Even her caseworkers had a deep, tired hunch in their shoulders. She could see the irritability behind their eyes, not unkindly meant, not necessarily malicious. Just tired. The exhaustion of people who had seen too many suitcases, too many intake forms. Too many small, silent faces of children that had learned not to ask for anything because asking required a belief that someone was listening.
When she finally turned nineteen, she took a job at a local diner, pulling back-to-back shifts that blurred together. All to afford a tiny, rat-infested apartment that smelt like paint thinner. She would float through the late-night lull of the neon-lit diner, like a grey ghost. Depleted and exhausted.
And then he walked in.
He must have looked like an anchor to a woman who had spent her whole life drifting. She thought she had found a fairytale, a Prince Charming who would change her life. A name, a house, enough money to live comfortably, love and a world where she wouldn’t have to scramble from one place to another anymore. A place that she finally belonged to. A place to call home.
She realized too late that she had married a monster.
My father didn’t hit us because he had deep-seated wounds. He didn’t hit us because of some unresolved trauma. He didn’t hit us because he hated himself.
He hit us because he could.
Because no one would stop him.
Because he wanted to.
I spent my whole life searching for a reason, an explanation, a wound that would make his violence make sense. But there is no reason. There is no explanation. There is no wound deep enough to excuse the deliberate, daily choice to hurt.
People don’t need a reason to be cruel. They just need the power to get away with it. It’s that simple.
Realizing this didn’t make me angry. It made me feel light. If there was no reason for his violence, then there was no responsibility for me to fix it.
The same hollowness lived inside his cheating. Julian didn’t cheat because of something I did or didn’t do. He didn’t cheat because our marriage was broken or because I wasn’t enough. He cheated for the same reason my father was violent. Because he could. Because no one stopped him. Because he wanted to and that was reason enough.
It was that simple.
Instead of accepting that, he’s making himself the victim.
He’s making his cheating sound like an accident. Like something that happened to him, not something he did. Heis not taking responsibility. He is explaining. Contextualizing. Finding reasons outside himself for the choices he made.
The words are there, in my mind, but they won’t come out. They are lodged in my throat, behind the years of silence, behind the training that taught me that my voice does not matter.
So I ask the only thing I can make sense of:
“Okay,” I say slowly. “But what does that have to do with me going back with you?”
Julian pauses.
He stares at me for a moment, as if I’ve asked something that doesn’t make sense.
Then he exhales sharply, runs a hand through his hair, and leans in. “It has everything to do with it,” he says, his voice strained. “Because I’m telling you I’ll be better. I’m telling you it won’t happen again. I swear it. So just… come home.”
He continues without waiting for a reply. “Do you have any idea how miserable I’ve been? What happened to me the day I came home and couldn’t find you? I thought you were just angry, and you’d come back, so I waited. And then I got served divorce papers instead.”
He shakes his head, frowning like he’s the one who was wronged. The frown is genuine. He believes what he’s saying. He believes that he is the victim, that I have been cruel, that the divorce papers were an attack rather than an escape.
“How could you do that, Nora? You can’t just throw away a marriage like it’s nothing. I was so worried I couldn’t even eat.”
No.
You probably couldn’t eat because I wasn’t there to cook.
