Chapter 2
Arthur Sterling stepped out with his tumbler of whiskey and his courthouse authority and his face already set into the expression of a verdict that had been delivered before a single fact was heard. My mother appeared in the doorway behind him with her hand at her throat and her wedding ring catching the chandelier light. Julian was already performing, both hands pressed to his face, voice going theatrical with injury, telling a story about what had happened that had the shape of a story and none of the truth.
Arthur did not look at me long enough to ask what had happened. He looked at his son's blood and he looked at me on the floor where I had stumbled back, and he set his glass on the hall table with the deliberate click of a man who has already decided what comes next.
He pulled the belt from the loops slowly.
Slowly, because the slowness was also a message. Because a powerful judge understands that fear requires duration, that the anticipation is part of the instrument, that a man who controls courtrooms controls this hallway by the same method, which is the absolute certainty that there will be no appeal.
"Arthur," my mother said, from the doorway.
That was all she said.
I watched her face while she said it and I watched what happened after, which was that she took one step back and turned toward the brass umbrella stand near the front door and let the world rearrange itself without her. Three years of small choices had led her here, to this exact doorway, to this exact single word that cost her nothing and changed nothing and protected no one. I memorized the look on her face because I needed to understand it completely so I could stop wondering about it later.
Then the belt came down.
I will not dress this up. Arthur Sterling stood in his own hallway and used a leather belt on a twenty-one-year-old woman because his son had gotten his nose broken trying to corner her against a wall, and there was no one in that house willing to place themselves between the belt and my back. I covered my head with my arms and I counted the strikes the way I counted things when I needed to stay present, and Julian stood behind his bloody towel and watched and did not look away, and my mother stared at the umbrella stand as though if she looked long enough the brass would reveal some kind of instruction.
May you like
When Arthur stopped, it was not because he had been moved by anything I did or said or showed him. It was because his arm tired. He straightened and looked down at me on the floor and waited to see whether I would cry, and I gave him the particular stillness of someone who has decided that he does not get that either.
Julian crouched near me. "Still want to call your dad?"
