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‘He wanted to spare you from it, Skye. It was … awful.’

‘I know that now.’

The sound of the front door opening had Skye quickly standing. She tried to paste a smile on her face, but when TJ walked in, his dad at his side, he saw straight through it. His eyes shifted from her face to the chair. His smile faltered.

‘My parents refused to take it down, so that when I had a flare-up, I could get to my room.’

For one long second, nobody said anything. Skye could feel Ryan and Janey’s dread, as if they’d live with TJ’s anger for too long to risk continuing the conversation.

But Skye refused to be cowed by him, and she knew that TJ didn’t benefit from everyone avoiding mention of his injury. What happened had happened, and they would live with that. But they could still live well.

Riding on a whim, she sat down in the chair. She put her feet up on the footplate, raised both her eyebrows at TJ. ‘So, Jones? How fast does this thing go anyhow?’

TJ’s grin was lightning quick. ‘Oh, it’s a wild ride.’ He moved to the control panel by her arm, said, ‘You better hold on, baby.’

Skye, feeling slightly concerned, gripped the arms of the chair. TJ turned the stairlift on, so that it hummed happily. He turned the dial to the number five, the highest speed, and asked, ‘You sure you ready?’

Skye nodded. ‘I barrel race for a living. I think I got it.’

He pressed the up arrow. There was no starting lurch, no quick zip upwards. Just a smooth, gliding ascent – at a snail’s pace.

TJ took the steps one at a time, waiting for her to come abreast of him in the chair before moving to the next one. It was painfully slow. Skye could appreciate the mechanics of it; she could understand that, for many people, the stairlift was a life-altering piece of technology that allowed them to access parts of their houses that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to. But TJ was a bull rider: a man whose idea of work had been to take on animals that weighed upwards of fifteen hundred pounds, a man who had lived for the thrill of the ride and the fear of the dismount. So, he wouldn’t have seen the stairlift as a gift or a necessity. He would have seen it as a slow ascent to hell.

Skye looked up at TJ and was surprised to see that he was smiling – no, laughing at her. ‘Enough of a thrill for you?’

Skye raised her hands in the air as if she were on a rollercoaster. She leaned exaggeratedly with the chair as it crept around the corner of the L-shaped staircase, affected a bright, ‘Woohoo!’

TJ’s laugh was loud. It travelled down the stairs to where Ryan and Janey stood, leaning against one another, their hands linked, tears of relief streaming down their faces.

It was only later that night, as they sat around the dining-room table sharing a meal, that Ryan said, ‘If it’s okay with you, Skye, I think it’s time you filled us in on the situation with your father.’

Skye hesitated.

TJ saw it. He raised his hand to place it over hers on the table. ‘It doesn’t matter what you tell us. We’re on your side. Always.’

‘We just want to be prepared,’ Ryan agreed. He looked to Janey, added, ‘We want to help if we can.’

Beneath TJ’s hand, Skye’s relaxed. She started quietly, slowly. ‘I can’t remember the first time. It was more like … I don’t know. Like it had always been like that. My earliest memories are of being afraid of my father …’

As she talked, as she recounted her childhood, glossing over the worst atrocities as if they were simply a fact of life, TJ’s rage – his hatred – grew. He couldn’t fathom how a father could routinely and systematically punish his own child.

He looked at Skye as she sat next to him, dry-eyed and pale, and he promised that, one day, if they had little girls of their own, he’d show her how a man was supposed to raise his children. He’d show her what Ryan and Janey had shown him all throughout his childhood: that you could get away with a lot of mistakes as a parent if your children knew that they were loved, that it was never okay to take out your own frustrations and inadequacies on anyone else, and that there was nothing a child could do that should warrant physical harm as a punishment.

‘By the time I was sixteen, I knew that things weren’t normal. I had been put in an in-patient psychiatric hospital for “attacking” my father.’ She subtly pulled her hand out from under TJ’s when she said that.

But he didn’t let her add that distance, didn’t let her face her past alone. He reached for her, lifted her out of her chair and onto his lap, despite her snapped ‘TJ, your back.’

He just kissed her until she fell quiet, then pulled back. ‘Go on.’

‘The truth was that I had fought back for the first time. I scratched his face, and he knocked me unconscious. He must have panicked about trying to explain his face because he called the police. He told them that I had mental health issues and had been released from a facility six months earlier. Which was technically true. He said that I attacked him. And my mom took his side – not because she wanted to,’ Skye was quick to add. ‘Because she didn’t see any other way out.’

Across the table, his own mom’s face was pale, her eyes wide with horror. His dad was silent, but his eyes burned with a rage that TJ had never seen in his mild-mannered father.

‘I started to hate him after that. Like truly hate him,’ Skye said matter-of-factly. ‘And in hating him, I started to play the game too. I started to retaliate.’ Skye smiled, but TJ noticed that her blue eyes were flat. ‘It was small things at first. Little things I knew would irritate him – leaving a single dirty dish on the kitchen counter, wearing fashionable instead of appropriate clothes, letting my grades slip a few points. When the threats and shaming didn’t work, he’d get physical. But only in ways that didn’t leave obvious marks. And when I just let it come, he started punishing my mother for everything I did. So I stopped.’

She went on to explain how she’d met Stevie and Andrea, and how they’d slowly pulled her out of that protective shell. She detailed leaving Dallas and only stopped when she said, ‘And then Sheridan gave me your number, and I ended up here.’ She tried to smile, but it fell flat. She was curled against him, her posture rounded, as if she were expecting judgement and wanted to shelter against it.

TJ pulled her closer, letting her take that comfort.