I was six months along when Colm came home angry after a fight he’d had with his father. I had never seen him so livid. I could tell it was not safe for me to be in the house and I wanted to escape to my mother’s while he settled down. When I mentioned that I needed to take something up to Mam’s, he took great offense, yelling at me that he had just gotten home, and when I tried to move past him and go anyway, he yanked me by the hair, threw me to the floor, and began to kick.

I tried to protect my child. I tried to crawl away, and when I could not, I curled into a ball and put my arms around my stomach. But the kicks from his heavy boots kept coming and coming until he finally tired of it. He stood over me for few seconds, breathing heavily.

“You’re a useless slag,” he said, nearly spitting the words on me. Then he grabbed his coat off its peg. “And don’t even think of going to your mam’s.” A second later he was out the door and on his way to the pub.

As soon as he was gone, the childbearing pains began to come. I struggled to my feet and out of the cottage. I got as far as halfway to the neighbor’s house before collapsing in water and blood. My tiny blossom of a girl was born that night as blue as a summer moon. I held her dead body as my vision went cloudy and as the blood continued to pour from inside me, and then I knew no more.

When I awoke two days later I was in a hospital bed in Belfast. I was not a mother. I would never be a mother. Everything within me that could make and hold a new life had been torn out of me.

I was in hospital for ten days. Colm did not come to Belfast to visit me. My mother came every day to sit with me and cry with me. I told her what Colm had done even though I knew it would hurt her.

“You’ll not be going home to him,” Mam said. “You’ll not.”

But I did. It was Colm who came for me the day I was discharged. He told me he couldn’t bring himself to come visit, and he felt bad for what had happened. But he did not seem sad that he had killed our baby girl and nearly killed me. When we arrived home, my mother came to the cottage and Colm sent her away. I watched her at the window crying as she went back to the house I had been born in, too weak to run after her.

I had cried my eyes dry, and I now felt nothing except for a cold, hard rumbling that was lurking deep within me, like water just about to boil. I didn’t know what to make of it. It didn’t feel like hatred; it felt stronger than that. The first time that Colm reached for me in bed after I miscarried our child, I just let him have his way. I felt nothing except that cold boil at the core of me. It was as if there was another person inside me with a plan, but I didn’t know what it was other than I wanted Colm to pay for what he had done. He had killed our daughter.