You were supposed to be safe in your own home, with your parents. They were supposed to protect you from the dangers outside.

“He was agitated all day. I shouldn’t have talked to Tom.” Mama sighed. “And now I suppose he’s gone to the compound to drink whiskey and eat hate with Mad Earl.”

Leni looked at her mother’s beaten, bruised face, the rag turning red with her blood. “You’re saying it’s your fault?”

“You’re too young to understand. He didn’t mean to do that. He just … loves me too much sometimes.”

Was that true? Was that what love was when you grew up?

“He meant to,” Leni said quietly, feeling a cold wave of understanding wash through her. Memories clicked into place like pieces of a puzzle, fitting together. Mama’s bruises, her always saying, I’m clumsy. She had hidden this ugly truth from Leni for years. Her parents had been able to hide it from her with walls and lies, but here in this one-room cabin there was no hiding anymore. “He has hit you before.”

“No,” Mama said. “Hardly ever.”

Leni tried to put it all together in her head, make it make sense, but she couldn’t. How could this be love? How could it be Mama’s fault?

“We have to understand and forgive,” Mama said. “That’s how you love someone who’s sick. Someone who is struggling. It’s like he has cancer. That’s how you have to think of it. He’ll get better. He will. He loves us so much.”

Leni heard her mother start to cry, and somehow that made it worse, as if her tears watered this ugliness, made it grow. Leni pulled Mama into her arms, held her tightly, stroked her back, just like Mama had done so many times for Leni.

Leni didn’t know how long she sat there, holding her mother, replaying the horrible scene over and over.

Then she heard her father’s return.

She heard his uneven footsteps on the deck, his fumbling with the door latch. Mama must have heard it, too, because she was crawling unsteadily to her feet, pushing Leni aside, saying, “Go upstairs.”

Leni watched her mama rise; she dropped the wet, bloody rag. It fell with a splat to the floor.

The door opened. Cold rushed in.

“You came back,” Mama whispered.

Dad stood in the doorway, his face lined in agony, his eyes full of tears. “Cora, my God,” he said, his voice scratchy and thick. “Of course I came back.”

They moved toward one another.

Dad collapsed to his knees in front of Mama, his knees cracking on the wood so loudly Leni knew there would be bruises tomorrow.