“What are you doing here?” she said to her father as his face filled with a purple, throbbing rage. He hid behind his religion. He quoted the Bible; he had it memorized. But it was an act. There was no true love there, or compassion, or faith, only a desire to control her and her mother—a squat man using religion to manipulate and abuse.

“Don’t talk to me like that, young woman,” he hissed. “You sinful, disobedient, slutty wretch,” his voice rose sanctimoniously, “Betsy, you will come home now and repent.”

“No,” she said, tilting her chin up. She was always tired from working and going to school, but she was proud of herself. She had escaped her parents, and she was living a whole new life. She still had nightmares about her father: He would chase her through her dreams, he would catch her and smack her across the face, and her mother would stand there and whimper and wring her hands but do nothing to stop the beating. She would wake up panting, sweating, angry, pained, then so incredibly relieved she wasn’t living with him anymore.

“I’m not going home with you.”

“Yes, you are.” Her father’s hands were clenched at his sides. She knew he was trying not to grab her, shove her against a wall, and tell her to “begin reciting Luke.... Name the books of the Bible.... Tell me the story of the woman by the well, you devil whore. . . .”

Her mother told her to “obey her father” in her spindly, frail voice, her eyes filling with tears. “Please, Betsy. Come home. We’ll pray about this together. Right, Hansen?”

“Shut up, Mary,” her father said to her mother, and her mother’s head dropped. It made Betsy sick. It made her furious.

“You will never defend me, will you, Mom?” Tears rushed to Betsy’s eyes, every tear a hundred cries she had never let herself have. Every tear a sign of the continuous betrayal of her mother. “You let him hurt me. You never tried to protect me.”

“Betsy,” she said, barely above a whisper, wringing her hands, her gold eyes anguished, the same eyes as her daughter. “Come with us. We’ve been so worried about you.”

“I am safer here than with him, and you know it, Mom. You know what he’s done to me. You know how he’s hurt me. Why do you want me to live with that again?”

Her mother’s expression showed all her guilt, her fear, her fearful selfishness, her powerlessness.

“You are an ungrateful, Godless woman who has embraced the blackness of this world,” her father’s voice boomed. “You will burn for this, but not until I have put you back on God’s righteous path.”