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DAKOTA

The kitchen smells like old grease and stale beer, same as it always does.

I stand at the stove and stir a pot of canned soup, watching the condensation bead down the side of a Budweiser can on the counter beside me. Not mine. I never had any interest in touching the stuff, not since at sixteen I watched my mother pour herself a glass of wine at nine in the morning, her hands already shaking before she’d even had breakfast.

That was twelve years ago. Old habit, watching the cans. Counting them.

Three on the counter. Two more on the coffee table through the door. I heard the crack-hiss of a sixth about twenty minutes ago from the living room, where the television blares some late-night talk show.

Two months since Mom died. Sixty-one days, to be exact. Liver failure, the doctor had said, with that tone doctors use when they really want to say “You knew this was coming”.And I did. I’d known it the same way you know a storm is rolling in when the sky turns that particular shade of gray and you can feel the air heavy in your lungs with each breath. You see it, youbrace for it as you’ve done countless times before, and then when it hits you, it rips your feet from under you anyway.

The grief isn’t clean. It’s jagged and complicated in ways I haven’t figured out yet.

What I have figured out is that I need to leave.

The floorboard groans behind me.

“That for me?” Gerald’s voice comes out thick, words muddled as if they’re wrapped in cotton from the booze. I don’t turn around.

“It’s just soup.”

“I can see it’s soup, Dakota.” He drags a chair out from the kitchen table, and the legs screech against the tile. “I asked if it was for me.”

“There’s enough for both of us.”

He makes a sound in the back of his throat. Not agreement. Not disagreement. Just a noise he makes when he’s working himself toward saying something. I keep my eyes on the pot and listen to the sound of him settling into the chair, the pop of another can, the long pull as he swallows.

Gerald Fitch has been my stepfather for fourteen years. He married my mother when I was fourteen, and for the first few months, he seemed decent enough. Stable job. Didn’t drink as much as Mom. Said the right things about taking care of us.

Then Mom’s drinking got worse. And Gerald’s mask started to slip.

It started small. Comments about how I looked. How I dressed. His hand on my lower back when Mom wasn’t looking. The way he’d stand too close in the hallway, blocking my path until I squeezed past him.

I was still just fourteen when it stopped being comments.

I was fourteen the first time he came into my room at night.

I told myself I wanted it. That’s what he said. That I wanted it, that I was special, that this was our secret. I was a kid. I didn’tknow any better. Mom was too drunk to notice, and when she was sober enough to see, she turned a blind eye. She didn’t want to accept responsibility for the choices she made or the price I would pay for those choices.

It went on for four years.

Four years of him coming to my room when Mom passed out. Four years of him telling me I was beautiful, I was his, nobody else would ever want me the way he did. Four years of my body not being my own.

When I turned sixteen, I signed up for MMA classes at a gym across town. Told Gerald I was working extra shifts. Told Mom I needed the exercise.

The truth was simpler: I wanted to learn how to break bones.

It took six months of training before I could look him in the eye without flinching. A year before I felt strong enough to fight back if I needed to. Eighteen months before he stopped coming to my room entirely.

He never said why. But I saw it in his eyes. The calculation of a predator when the prey grows teeth, when the risk finally outweighs the reward. He was scared of me. Scared of what I could do to him now.

Ten years. Ten years since he last tried.

I thought it was over.

I pour the soup into two bowls and place one on the table in front of him. He looks at it, then at me. I sit across from him with mine and keep my spine straight.