Page 154 of This Life of Mine

Something in his expression shifts.

I lean back into the chair, my eyes drifting somewhere past him. “Paper record’s incidents. Timelines. Hospital visits. Police reports.” My fingers lace together loosely in my lap. “But you won’t find reports for everything I went through in my life.”

The room grows still around us.

“My mom had been married before,” I say. “She had a son. Peter. My half-brother. He’s five years older than me.” My voice stays steady, even as my chest tightens. “Every other summerPeter stayed with his father in Washington. The other summers he was with us.”

I pause. “They were the worst summers of my life.”

“Peter was cruel. Violent.” I hesitate, then push through. “He actually tried to kill me as a child. Twice.”

Alex goes very still.

What stayed with me wasn’t what he did—it was how quickly my body adapted. How something inside me shut down the part that screamedthis isn’t normaland replaced it withstay still, stay quiet, survive this moment.

That’s the thing about repeated danger—it stops feeling shocking. It becomes procedural.

“Once, he tried to open the car door on the highway—to push me out. Another time, he shoved me into the middle of a busy intersection.”

The room feels heavy now. Cold.

This is where everything gets much worse.

Chapter forty-seven

Lina

Ifocus on my hands as I begin to relive the past.

“My younger brother and I…we experienced a lot of physical abuse as kids,” I continue. “The kind that doesn’t leave room for confusion about whether it’s wrong.” I swallow.

“I was locked in closets for hours at a time. Total darkness. No sound but my own breathing.” My voice stays steady, even though the memory isn’t. “While that was happening, my younger brother was beaten black and blue. And I couldn’t protect him. I could hear it, but I couldn’t stop it.”

Fear loses its power when it becomes routine. Locked in darkness long enough, your mind stops fighting it. You count breaths. You detach. You learn that panic wastes time—and time is the one thing you can’t afford to lose. I didn’t learn how to scream. I learned how to withstand it without making noise.

Alex’s jaw tightens, but he still doesn’t speak.

“When I was eleven,” I go on, “my brother became the leader of a local gang.” I scoff with laughter like this all sounds like a joke.

His eyes flicker slightly.

I draw a steadying breath. “At 16, he was selling drugs and laundering weapons. So we were constantly surrounded by violence.”

“The abuse toward me eased up after that—but he kept hurting our younger brother.” I pause, fingers curling into my palm.

“Our normal life was drive-by shootings. Gang members always hanging around. Chaos everywhere.” I gently close my eyes, remembering it all.

Violence didn’t feel like a crisis. It felt like weather—something you checked before leaving the house. You learned which streets to avoid, which faces to trust, when to disappear into the background.

Other kids grew up afraid of strangers. I grew up afraid of familiarity—the people who smiled at you one day and hurt you the next.

I meet Alex’s eyes again. “Until, Peter went to jail. Then prison. Charged with capital murder. He was only seventeen.”

Silence stretches.

“And then,” I say softly, “just a year later my mom got sick.”

Alex’s expression changes—he already knows where this leads.