From inside my pocket, I retrieve the key. My heart thuds against my chest as I hold it, feel the weight of it. I inherited this, too, along with everything else. To continue the tradition with my own family, I guess. What does it say about me that I haven’t burned it to the ground?

I slip the key into the lock and turn it, that sound, too, echoing. Although I think it’s in my head. Memory. The very real panic some memories elicit.

I touch my forehead and wipe the sweat that’s broken out. Then I chastise myself mentally for my weakness as I open the door.

For one terrifying moment, it’s as though he was just here. As though I am a boy in this room again. I can still smell his cigars and the leather of his boots and his whips. It all clings to this place, making it hard to breathe. I enter and switch on the light. The room is wired for electricity even though the entrance isn’t. The bulb flickers from lack of use, but a moment later, a cold, unforgiving light washes over the space.

I close the door behind me and slip my phone into my pocket, taking a moment. Needing that time to remember that it was the past. He’s gone. Dead and buried. We all survived. Well, almost all of us.

With a deep sigh, I open my eyes. It’s a simple room. Cold. I remember how cold it always was at first as we shivered before we were even told to strip but how quickly it would grow too warm. How had I forgotten that? I go straight to the cabinet where he kept the scotch. The bottle he never got to finish is half-full. I drink a healthy swallow, then another, right from the bottle before capping it. I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand and look around the room. It’s all the same. Everything is in its place. My grandfather’s leather wingback chair and the small table beside it are both covered in dust. As is all the other furniture. The tools of his punishments. I never got rid of anything. I just locked it up and should probably have thrown away the key.

My father was the only one to escape his wrath. The rest of us, even my mother, even well into adulthood and married herself, submitted to him. To his rage. And what he did to her when he learned the truth about Theron, it turns my stomach to remember it.

He made me watch, though. Made me bear witness. To teach me that no one can be trusted. That all women are whores, including my mother. That weak men deserve their fate.