If only she’d had a mom to offer advice, things might have been different, but her Chinese mother had left home five years earlier. She’d just walked out without so much as a goodbye. Val’s dad said it was because she didn’t love them anymore, but that had never made sense. Val had heaps of memories of a warm, affectionate woman who used to build elaborate sandcastles, who taught her old Chinese songs about tigers and pandas, and made her favorite jam sandwiches cut into butterfly shapes. It had never made sense that she’d left them.

Val’s teenage years had been overshadowed by that huge, baffling loss, and when Tony came along calling her “princess,” buying her presents and telling her she was beautiful, she fell into his arms. She was lonely and desperate to be loved, and he seemed a catch. He was good at math and planned to work in finance. He played for the rugby team, so he was strong and fit. She was only slight in stature and she liked the fact that he was so much bigger. Why did he pick her out of all the prettier, more confident girls in their year? When she asked, he said he liked being her first boyfriend, because he didn’t want a girl who’d been around the block. He could tell she was unhappy and he wanted to be the one to rescue her; she was precious and special and he loved her with all his heart.

Looking back, it was easy to see the moments when she should have walked away. The first time Tony slapped her was the week before their wedding, when she shrank one of his shirts in a hot wash. He tried to make a joke of it, but the slap hurt and left a stinging puce mark on her cheek that she had to cover with pancake makeup. On their beach-resort honeymoon she was sore and bleeding from the roughness of the sex, but still he wanted more and she had to bury her face in the pillows to muffle her cries of pain. But it was around three months into the marriage that she learned the true nature of her Jekyll and Hyde husband.

She’d spent a couple of hours that afternoon sitting in the sunny backyard reading a library book she simply couldn’t put down. Dinner was prepared, because she knew Tony liked to eat as soon as he got in the door at five thirty, but she’d forgotten to clean his boots, which had gotten muddy during a weekend hike in the Blue Mountains.

“Hey, baby,” he’d said, coming into the kitchen and sitting at the table. “What’s cooking?” He grabbed her butt and squeezed as she walked past, then his eyes scanned the room and alighted on the boots still on the mat by the back door.