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They corner you, sweet-talk you, slip rings on fingers and bruises on skin like the two are part of the same vow. They teach you that obedience is love and silence is safety.
And if you run?
Well. That’s when they really start to hunt.
I’d seen it too many times.
Doesn’t matter how many casseroles I bring or howmany verses I can quote about forgiveness. Some things don’t get fixed with prayer. Some things just need to be survived.
A little after nine, I went to lock up the side entrance. The alley behind the building was slick with rain, mist curling through the chain-link. I paused before turning the deadbolt, staring into the shadows.
And just for a second, I swear I felt someone watching.
I turned fast, but there was no one. Just the old magnolia tree and the soft, steady hum of the streetlamp.
Still, the chill in my spine stayed.
I pressed the lock into place and stepped back, heart thudding harder than it ought to. Maybe I was tired. Maybe I was just being dramatic. My daddy always said I had a “poet’s nerves and a preacher’s mouth.” He wasn’t wrong.
But tonight …
Tonight something felt different.
I don’t know why I looked again. Why I stepped back toward the door and squinted into the dark.
But if I’d known whose eyes would be watching from the shadows?—
I’d have prayed harder.
And run faster.
Maybe it was the way the wind caught the corner of the storm drain, or the rustle of that magnolia tree’s low branches. But something lingered in the air—thick and wrong.
I stood there longer than I should’ve, hand resting on the cool metal of the doorframe, listening. Waiting.
Nothing.
Still, the unease followed me all the way back to the kitchen. I sank onto one of the mismatched stools at thecounter and wrapped both hands around my coffee mug again, staring at the steam as if it might give me answers.
Most of the other girls my age spent their Friday nights getting drinks downtown or swiping left on men with too-perfect teeth and too-slick words. Me? I was twenty-seven, single, and the daughter of a Southern Baptist preacher. Born and raised in a tiny town called Estill, South Carolina with a Bible in one hand and a fear of disappointing God in the other.
I lived in Mount Pleasant now and taught kindergarten at Trinity Covenant Academy—a private Christian school not far from the waterfront where the kids said things like “yes ma’am” and “God bless.” Every morning began with a prayer circle, and every afternoon ended with finger paints and memory verses. My students brought me hand-picked flowers and called me Miss Calhoun even when I begged them just to say Hallie Mae. I adored them. I really did.
But sometimes, when the sun slipped down behind the steeple and the world got quiet, I felt like I lived two lives.
There was that one. The soft one.
And then there was this.
This aching, heavy thing that had taken root in my chest the day I first stepped through Grace House’s front door.
It had started as a college service project—something I signed up for to make Daddy proud. "Be the hands and feet, baby girl," he’d said when I told him I’d chosen a domestic violence shelter instead of the nursery at church. I think he figured I’d make casseroles, smile politely, and be home in time for dinner.
He didn’t know that once I saw what it really lookedlike—what some women survived just to breathe each morning—I couldn’t unsee it.
Even after graduation, after job offers and apartment hunting and every sweet boy at Bible study who wanted to talk about how many kids we’d have someday ...
I stayed.