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“You been training today?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“Place stinks when you come back.”

“I shower.”

“Still stinks.” He wraps both hands around the soup bowl like he’s warming them, even though it’s August in Floridaand eighty degrees outside. “Your mother always showered too. Didn’t help.”

I put a spoonful of soup in my mouth, chew on nothing, and swallow.

He likes to do that. Work her name in, especially now. Drop it into conversation like a stone into still water, waiting to see the ripples. Waiting for me to react, to cry, to give him something he can use. I learned a long time ago to go very still instead.

“House is a mess,” he says.

“I cleaned on Tuesday.”

“Doesn’t look like it.”

“Then maybe look harder.”

He sets his can down slowly on the table, and I watch his jaw tighten. It’s a shift in his expression that I’ve learned to track. “You getting smart with me?”

“No.”

“Sounded smart.”

“I said no.” I hold his gaze. “House is clean, Gerald. I cleaned it.”

He stares at me for another few seconds, then picks up the beer again, and the tension drains out of the room. He goes back to eating the soup. I breathe again.

This is how it goes now. Push, retreat. Push, retreat. He hasn’t touched me in ten years, but he still tests the boundaries, see how close he can get before I push back. Mostly, I go still and wait for him to lose interest.

Tonight, he seems content to let it go.

I think about the article on my phone. I’ve read it four times since Tuesday.

Oath MMA: Ravenwood Hollow’s Rising Fight Gym Throws Open Its Doors.

The headline had a photo with it. A clean gym with good equipment, a quote from the owner, a man named Victor,about building a training culture that actually means something. Inclusivity. Real fighters. Real coaching. No discrimination about race or sexual orientation. They’re bringing in a mixed training group with different weight classes and disciplines. Pairing fighters with coaches who’ll push them.

It’s in Ravenwood Hollow. Ravenwood is in Virginia. Virginia is fourteen hours north of where I’m sitting right now, eating soup across from a man who stole four years of my life in a house that has never been a home.

Fourteen hours feels like nothing.

I wash the bowls when we’re done. Gerald heads back to the living room. I hear the television volume climb, then climb again. Drying my hands on the dish towel, I look out the window above the sink at the darkened backyard, at the broken lawn chair no one has moved in three years, at the fence post that leans fifteen degrees to the left.

My mother used to stand at this window. She’d stand here and look out at nothing the same way I am now, holding whatever she was feeling at arm’s length where it couldn’t get at her. I understand that impulse better now.

She knew, some part of her had to have known, but she chose the bottle over me every single time.

I go to my room and read the article a fifth time. Then I start looking up bus routes north. After a while, I must have fallen asleep with my phone on my chest because the sound that wakes me isn’t an alarm. It’s the bedroom door.

My bedroom door doesn’t have a lock. It’s never had a lock. I tried to install one when I was sixteen, but Gerald removed it while I was at school. Said it was a fire hazard. Said he needed to be able to check on me.

The room is dark. The clock on my phone says 2:17 AM.

“Gerald.” My voice is flat. “Get out.”