“I do,” I said, but I didn’t understand what this had to do with Elise.

“If I tell you something will you promise not to tell anyone else?”

I nodded. This was it, I thought. The moment she’d finally, finally tell me the thing she’d been alluding to for months.

“Promise,” she insisted.

“I promise,” I said. She’d been there for me and I didn’t want to let her down.

Elise took a deep breath, like she might lose her nerve. Then she pulled her shirt off and turned on the bedside lamp. Sweeping her long hair aside, she angled herself and shrugged off one of her bra straps so I could see it: a patch of sickly green skin—a healing bruise.

“What happened?” I asked, completely shocked. I didn’t know what she was going to tell me but never in a million years would I have thought that this was it.

She let her hair fall and pulled her strap up before slipping back into her shirt. “What always happens. My father.”

28.

It all came back to me then, what she’d said New Year’s Eve.

Your parents suck. But they’re not that bad.

There are gradations. All they do is argue with each other and throw the word divorce around once in a while.

You’re lucky, in a lot of ways.

All this time, she’d built a wall of silence around her father, a barricade to protect herself, but once she chipped away the smallest opening, it all crumbled, the dam breaking.

“This is nothing,” she said, slipping back into her shirt. “A few days ago, he shoved me. I lost my balance and caught my shoulder against the corner of one of the kitchen counters.”

“Oh my God.”

She pulled back into herself against the headboard, and staring off at the other wall, she began to name some of the things that her dad had done to her over the years.

“When I was eleven or twelve, he picked me up from a sleepover and slammed my head into the window—twice—for wearing red lipstick. Told me I looked like trash.”

She spoke softly, almost monotonously, like she was listing off items on a menu.

“When I was eight or nine, he shoved me so hard my face slammed into the leg of a chair when I fell. It’s how I got this scar,” she said, touching the scar above her left eye. I’d always wondered about that scar and assumed it was from a childhood accident. And then I thought, with growing horror: Had there been other things I overlooked?

“Whenever he gets angry and can’t reach me right that second, he’ll grab whatever’s nearby. A coffee mug. A frying pan. He once pulled the biggest, thickest hardcover book off our shelves and flung it at me over and over again, then when he got tired, he picked it up and beat the shit out of me with it.”

It was scary, hearing her recount such violence in a muted voice, like she was talking about someone else. Like it was too painful to talk about herself.