Trudy never knew where it came from—the roar and crush of his ire and disappointment. She’d just barely been mature enough back then to know it hadn’t started with her—something that forceful and ugly started much earlier and went much deeper—but she also knew she didn’t have the power to fight it. The prey always knew when it’d been caught in the web. Fighting only made it worse.

When Violet had left that night, disappointed and resigned that Trudy wouldn’t stand up to him, Jay took his anger and embarrassment out on his wife. His fists were like hammers, his mocking voice like a dagger. When he finished he gently smoothed her hair back from her forehead, kissed her damp skin, and said he’d be home later. Then he walked out. She heard his boat motor crank and knew he was headed to the Showboat.

Time crept by—it could have been one hour, it could have been five—then a knock sounded at the door. With her head wrapped in a fuzzy gauze of fear and pain, she crept to the door and opened it, and there stood Violet. Trudy crumpled like an empty grocery sack, then all she knew was Violet’s soft hands, her warm fingertips, her strong arms carrying her to the couch. A warm cloth on her head, a glass at her elbow, then, next to her feet, a suitcase. “I’ll take care of it,” her sister said. “I promise.”

In her stupor Trudy nodded off, and when she came to, Violet was gone but there was a sound. A shout or some kind of mangled scream. She rose from the couch and wobbled out the back door, moving toward the sound coming from the dock. Her head was still fuzzy, but a small pinhole of clarity opened in the fuzz and through it she saw her husband on top of Violet, his hands around her neck.

Trudy quickened her pace and as she approached the dock, she stumbled over the bricks Jay had been using to build a terrace at the edge of their property. That pinhole of clarity opened wider. The world around her became clearer.

Her fingers closed around the edge of a brick, the hard red clay biting into the skin of her fingers. Her feet on the warm wooden boards were silent. As she got closer she could feel the steamy, red heat rising from his back and head. Desperate to save Violet—and yes, herself too—Trudy raised her arm high in the air, the brick clasped tight. Just before she brought it down, Violet reached up from under Jay, her hands scrabbling for Jay’s neck.

* * *

“Then he collapsed.” Violet flicked her thumbnails together. “I don’t know how hard I squeezed, but somehow it was hard enough. I did it. I killed him.”

“It’s not true,” Trudy said.

Violet’s head snapped up so hard she felt a crick in her neck. It was Trudy’s voice, but not. It was scratchy and raw, more sandpaper than smooth vocal cords, but it was so sweet—the sweetest thing Violet had ever heard.