Quick as a flash, Tony reached across and rapped her knuckles with the handle of his knife, so hard Val could hear the clunk of metal on bone. “Mind your manners,” he said calmly.

Nicole gasped, a deep, long in-breath when time seemed suspended.

Val leaped to her feet and ran around the table before the scream erupted. She knew her daughter’s cries intimately: the ones that were for show when she wasn’t really hurt; the ones when she was scared rather than injured; but this was a cry of genuine pain. She grabbed Nicole and scooped her into her arms, then yelled at Tony, hysteria in her voice.

“You can’t do that! She’s only five!”

She could put up with him hitting her, but not her baby. Nicole was screaming, her whole body trembling. Val lifted the reddened knuckle to her lips and kissed it softly, feeling her daughter’s pain. Should she run it under a cold tap? Might the bones be broken?

“She’s got to learn,” Tony said, lifting a forkful of sausage to his mouth. “You know how I feel about table manners.”

Val never swore, but a string of expletives filled her head. She wanted Tony to feel her fury, and only the presence of the shrieking Nicole in her arms stopped her from venting it. Instead she hurried to the sink, where she made a cold compress, keeping one arm tightly around her daughter, not letting her go for a second. She sat with Nicole in her lap, holding the compress around her knuckles, rocking her gently as the screams subsided into sobs and then whimpers.

“Daddy didn’t mean to hurt you,” she whispered. “He didn’t know it would hurt so much.” But that was a lie. He had meant to inflict pain on their daughter. Severe pain.

In a flash, it came to Val that she had to leave him. If they stayed, he would bully Nicole just as her father had bullied her. History would repeat itself. She couldn’t bear to watch that confident, sunny little girl become anxious and withdrawn, the way she herself used to be as a teenager—still was, if truth be told.

“What’s for pudding, Val?” Tony demanded, but she ignored him.

Peggy had urged her to leave many times, but Val had always been overwhelmed by the knowledge that Tony would do everything in his power to stop her. She had never stood up to him, just as she had never stood up to her father. But Nicole was so full of happiness that it would be a crime to sit and watch as it was knocked out of her, blow by blow.

She had fallen asleep in Val’s arms now. She often fell asleep after hurting herself; it seemed to be her body’s physiological response to shock. Val rose to carry her upstairs to bed.

“Where’s the bloody dessert?” Tony called after her.