Confessions from the Quilting Circle, Maisey Yates [animal farm read TXT] 📗

of the shower, letting the hot water pound on her skin, letting steam fill her nose and lungs.

And she’d convinced herself that nothing had to change.

That they could gloss this over.

She’d carefully taken the whole evening and begun to cut pieces from it like she was dividing up a scrap of fabric for a quilt.

She could rearrange it then. Leave parts out.

It’s what she’d been doing for years, she could keep on doing it. When a few years of happily married turned to a strange, passive-aggressive meanness that started eroding Avery’s confidence. When that had shifted to naked insults and two years ago finally...

Violence.

It had been a slow shift to get there, but it could change. It could. Anyway it wasn’t always bad.

Her parents wouldn’t blame her if she stayed, not if they understood.

David was their son-in-law and had been for so long they’d...if Avery was happy they would have to let it go.

If Avery was happy.

“Aren’t you eating, Mom?” Peyton asked.

Avery had only gotten coffee. She couldn’t stomach anything solid. She shook her head. “No. It’s too early for me.”

Peyton started in on the pancakes in front of her, Hayden picked at the bacon on his plate.

If she left David, the kids wouldn’t have their life anymore. If anyone knew that he’d lost his temper with her a few times...

He could lose his job.

And then where would the money come from?

How could they afford the house?

The kids’ school?

She was doing this for the kids.

“You have a bruise on your face, Mom,” Hayden said. Shockingly angry teenage eyes connected with hers. “I know he’s mean to you.”

“I...”

“He’s not that good at hiding it. He thinks he is, because he thinks he’s smarter than everybody else.”

Peyton didn’t say anything. She just sat there, staring straight ahead.

“Hayden,” Avery said slowly, “it’s complicated.”

“It’s not complicated. He’s a dick,” Hayden said, his voice shifting from boy to man in that sentence. “He always has been. He doesn’t care about anybody but himself.”

“That’s not true,” Peyton said, a tear sliding down her cheek. “Don’t say that about Dad.”

“Yeah well he likes you, Peyton, because you get straight A’s and you don’t talk back to him, and you’ll probably go to medical school. But he doesn’t care what I do, and he doesn’t care about Mom either.”

“He has a hard job!” Peyton exploded. “He has a lot of stress. If you weren’t such an asshole to him all the time, Hayden, he’d like you better.”

Avery felt like she’d been stabbed in the chest. Hearing her daughter issue the same sorts of excuses for David’s behavior that Avery herself had repeated over and over again. For every slight. Every hurt.

How had she not noticed that they were part of this? Peyton’s excusing him. Hayden’s anger. She’d told herself that because they’d never seen any of his violent outbursts they were protected.

But they weren’t.

“He’s hit me before,” Hayden said.

Avery’s stomach lurched. “He what?”

There weren’t words. Just a deep groaning in her heart, her soul. She nearly doubled over with it.

He’d hit Hayden.

You weren’t protecting them.

You were protecting you.

Your perfection.

Your life.

“Not like he hit you. But he slapped me once. When I got mad at him for not coming to my soccer game.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she whispered.

“For the same reason you didn’t tell me.”

That stabbed her. Right through her heart.

He’d been protecting her.

He’d been protecting her. Her son. Her little boy. And he was a boy. Not a man, like David, who should be held responsible for his actions and should not have the people he’d hurt bending over backward to keep him safe.

Peyton was weeping silently, there in a diner booth. Hayden was looking angry and defiant and she was...

Defeated.

Soul deep.

She’d failed her kids.

Her family.

Her husband, the man she’d married was gone. And it was like mourning a death. The man he’d been. The man she thought he was.

Maybe he’d never been the man she’d thought.

She didn’t know.

And then there was her.

The woman she’d thought she was.

She hadn’t seen herself as a battered wife. She’d seen herself as a warrior. Fighting to hold her home and family together.

She was proactive. A fixer. A doer.

Who’d convinced herself that taking a punch somehow went along with planning the carpool for soccer practice.

She hadn’t been doing or fixing anything. She’d been desperately bailing water out of a ship with a hole blown through it, fighting a losing battle and refusing to see it.

“I’m your mom, Hayden, it’s my job to protect you.”

“I had to protect you. Because nobody else was. And I didn’t know yet that he’d actually... Done more than just yell at you like he does. And when I realized... I want to kill him,” Hayden said.

The sorrow that broke apart in Avery was debilitating. Because she hadn’t known. She hadn’t realized how much of the toxicity had already gotten onto Hayden. She hadn’t understood that it was already seeping into other parts of her life. She had been convinced that it was only her. That she was standing there, taking it and protecting her children.

But they weren’t protected.

“I don’t know what to say,” she said, because she really didn’t. Because this all felt awful.

“Are you going to go to the police?” Peyton asked. “Are all my... All my friends going to know?”

“Who cares about your stupid friends?” Hayden asked.

“I do,” Peyton said.

Avery’s heart squeezed tight. Because she cared too. She cared about her own friends, the way that this would affect their normal. And she shouldn’t.

It hurt to remember that moment in The Miner’s House when she’d realized they knew. And not...not just suspected, knew. When she’d realized she was standing there burning alive and claiming she didn’t smell smoke.

If it wasn’t perfect, it was nothing.

She was nothing.

“Let’s skip school today,” she said, her voice rough. “I’m going to take you both to Grandma and Grandpa’s and then...we’ll figure it out.”

They finished breakfast and then went to the grocery store where she filled her cart with food she didn’t feel like eating. Cereal she never usually