The door flew open and Jack stumbled through. His curls were covered in a thin layer of snow. He removed his black, down-filled jacket and tossed it on the sofa.

“Where were you?” I asked as calmly as I could.

“The bar.”

“I was calling you. Why didn’t you pick up?”

“My phone was on silent.”

I took a puff of my cigarette and blew the smoke in his direction. “Were you with her?”

He removed his gloves and used them to brush the snow from his hair.

“Were you with her?” I repeated.

Jack just stared at me, irked and unblinking. He couldn’t even lie to me anymore.

Clutching my tumbler, I drew back and hurled it in his direction, narrowly missing his head as he ducked. The glass hit the wall and shattered behind him.

Jack’s eyes shot from the mess of glass on the floor to me and back again. “What the fuck is wrong with you? Why do you want to be broken? What the fuck is wrong with you?”

Calmly, I stood and made my way toward him. His face softened in relief for a moment, as though he thought I would apologize. Maybe I would console him. Maybe I would let him hold me and tell him it was all going to be okay. We’d get through this; we always got through everything, together. Instead, I stopped in front of his easel by the window. His latest piece had been sitting there, untouched, for months. I picked up a tube of black paint, squeezing it slowly onto the canvas. Using my index finger, I smeared the letters: F-U-C-K Y-O-U.

Chapter 72

My father was unchanging. He was neat, calculated, and controlled. Like a compressed spring, coiled and ready to launch. My mother drove him crazy—she always had—and that’s what he had liked about her. She was a volcano, messy and artful, leaving burnt chaos in her wake. She was uncontrollable.

In unconscious juxtaposition to my father, my mother longed for continual change. She was always rearranging the furniture in the living room—moving the paisley chair under the window, switching the lamps from one side of the sofa to the other—whereas my father preferred that everything remain in its designated place.

After my parents thought we were asleep, they would rendezvous in the kitchen to discuss my mother’s behaviour. This was a biweekly check-in, designed to diminish her position both as a mother and as a wife.

Sitting alone at the top of the stairwell, my feet dangling through the wooden railing, I would listen to my father’s report.

“You can’t even get out of the fucking bed,” he’d shout with strained control. “What’s wrong with you?”

My mother would remain silent; she knew it was a rhetorical question.

Through these one-sided conversations, I learned how communication worked. You simply listened as someone explained to you all the ways in which you weren’t good enough. You didn’t defend yourself, you didn’t have an opinion. You simply accepted the abuse, because that was what you deserved.