Page 21 of Beauty & Chaos

Past the fake smile...

I couldn’t even tell Sofia, but she’d discovered it five years after it started and lives with the knowledge it was happening all that time.

While I listened every night, fearing that I’d hear the little click, and he’d enter my room.

If time travel were possible, I’d go back to that first night, stand behind my bedroom door with a bat and pummel him into a pile of blood. If necessary, I’d spend the rest of my life in prison, so the little boy inside me never had to go through what I did.

Sofia might not have been my mom, but I loved her.

That night she came into my room is etched into my brain forever.

“Mr. Taylor! Mr. Taylor. Please. Get off.” I remember her yelling.

“Fuck. Get out. Sofia. Get out,” he yelled, but she was whacking his back, her wide eyes looking between me and my father, terrified.

But she never ran.

She protected me with her life.

Nearly.

“Get the fuck out of here, Sofia. Go. Pack your bags.” Dad got up in her face, but she crossed her arms, tears running down her face with a natural sense of protectiveness I don’t think I’ll ever experience.

A mama bear protecting her cubs. Even if I wasn’t hers.

“I will not. I will call the police,” she yelled.

Leo pressed her against the wall as I scrambled off my bed, tugging up my pajama pants before pushing him and kicking him.

“Leave her alone. Stop. I hate you. Stop hurting her.”

“Then you need to leave.” My father sneered. “If you leave now and stay silent, I will let you go.”

“You are a monster.” She spat in his face. “Get out.”

He stepped away, wiping his face, and she ran to me without hesitation. Wiping his hand on his pants, he glared at both of us, then walked out, doing up his zipper.

The pig.

Sofia and I broke down, falling to the floor and hugging one another. I was almost ten.

“That’s not the first time, is it?” she asked me.

I couldn’t answer.

He’d been doing it since Mom died. Since I was five. I didn’t want to tell her. Shame overtook me, along with all the threats he’d filled my mind with. But I shook my head as she held me tighter and rocked me like a baby.

“Putana!” she cursed.

We stayed like that for what felt like hours, clinging to one another, not knowing what the future would bring. The next morning, I woke up in my bed, and the house was quiet.

I knew why.

Sofia was gone.

I’d never felt more scared or alone in my life.

Not that she’d ever protected me, but in the absence of my mother, Sofia had cared for me and loved me where my father never had.