Page 82 of The New House

‘Amelia—’

‘And the time before that, when we lost Gracie,’ I continued relentlessly.

She looked away.

‘He’s changed,’ she said again.

‘He hasn’tchanged! He’s not capable of change! How many times does he have to break your bones for you to realise that? He’s only going to stop when he kills you!’

‘You heard her,’ my father said. ‘She’s not going anywhere.’

‘You were going to get a job, Mum,’ I pleaded. ‘We were going to get acat. We have an apartment now. We can manage. We don’t need him any more.’

‘I can’t, Millie,’ she said.

She’d already receded into quiet, semi-catatonic disavowal, the state she retreated to when she didn’t want to deal with the world. I’d lost. I already knew that. But I couldn’t give up: not quite, not yet.

I crouched beside her chair. ‘What about me, Mum?’ I begged. ‘Ineedyou. I’m sixteen: I can’t do it on my own. I need to go to school and pass my exams so I can go to uni and get us out of here. Please, Mum. If you go back to him, you know he’s going to take it out on me. We have to leave.’

‘Children need their fathers,’ my mother said, adjusting the cushion behind her back and picking up another runner bean.

‘He’s not afather! He’s a drunk and a bully who doesn’t care about anyone but himself! No child deserves a father like him!’

‘Is that so?’ my father said, his voice dangerously quiet.

I wasn’t afraid of my father, not any more. He was bigger and heavier than me, but I was quick and young. I wasn’t going to back down.

‘Get up,’ my father said, grabbing mymother’s shoulder. She winced as he hauled her to her feet: her fractured clavicle was still healing. He slung his heavy arm around her neck in a sick facsimile of affection and turned to me, smiling so widely his teeth showed.

For a moment I didn’t understand. And then I saw the way my mother’s hands cupped her gently swelling belly, her slightly embarrassed, proud air.

‘This baby’s a second chance, Millie,’ she pleaded. ‘For all of us. It’s going to be different this time. We can be a family again.’

I wanted to be sick.

‘Why?’ I whispered. ‘Why would you let him do this to you, Mum?’

‘I tried, Millie,’ she said. ‘But I can’t do this on my own. I’m not strong like you. This baby will be here in five months. I don’t want to raise it alone.’

‘You wouldn’t be alone. You’d haveme.’

‘You’ve got your own life. Like you said, you’ll be off to college in a couple of years. And your dad’s not perfect, but he’s a good father.’

‘Milliedoesn’t think I’m a good father,’ he said.

‘After what you did to Gracie?’ I hissed. ‘You’re a monster!’

‘She thinks this baby would be better off without me,’ my father said nicely to Mum. ‘Better it’s never born than it has a father like me, huh?’

I realised what he was going to do a split second before he did it, but she was blissfully unaware.

Still looking at me, still grinning that inane, hateful smile, my father drove his fist into my mother’s pregnant belly.

With a scream, she collapsed to the kitchen floor. I tried to get to her, but my father easily held me back. He kicked her in the belly again and again, until I finally wrested myself free of him and threw myself overmy mother. She was barely conscious. A large red bloom was already spreading across the back of her skirt.

‘Stop!’ I screamed. ‘You’re killing her!’

‘Good riddance,’ my father said, drawing back his foot and aiming a kick at Mum’s head.

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