When my sister Ruth finally found me, I was sitting on a twin bed in an upstairs room, my left eye still bruised. Marcus filled the doorway, blocking the exit. Ruth looked at my face and asked the question I’d choked on for months: “Why isn’t she living in the house she bought with Otis?” Marcus didn’t hesitate. He smiled and said, “That house is my wife’s now. And if my mother keeps talking, I’ll hit her again and she’ll wear that color for weeks.”

I touched my eye instinctively. The swelling had gone down some, but the bruise remained—dark, grotesque, impossible to hide.

“I fell,” I lied automatically, the words spilling out exactly as Marcus had ordered.

“You didn’t fall,” Ruth said, and she pushed past me into the room.

She looked around: the narrow bed, clothes hanging from nails because there was no proper closet, the broken window, the cold linoleum floor.

“What is this place?” she demanded. “Where is your house?”

I couldn’t answer. The words lodged in my throat like stones.

“Eda,” she said, voice tightening, “talk to me. What happened? Where is the house you bought with Otis?”

And then I heard footsteps in the hallway again—footsteps I knew too well.

Marcus.

He’d come to drop off the fifty miserable dollars he gave me every two weeks, like it was charity, like it balanced what he’d taken from me. He appeared in the doorway wearing that expression he wore now—arrogant, cold, calculating.

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