Chapter 1 - TRASH ON THE FLOOR
Greg called me trash before he raised his boot.
The first blow landed across the front of my left foot and drove me backward into the kitchen cabinet. A grocery bag slipped from my arm. A carton of eggs struck the tile and cracked beside my shoes.
I stared at him, unable to understand how an ordinary Saturday morning had become this.
Greg wore the brown work boots issued by the construction company where he supervised warehouse crews. They were heavy, reinforced, and still carried dried mud around the soles.
He lifted one again.
“No, please.”
The second strike landed across the same toes.
Pain shot through my foot and up my leg. I dropped beside the refrigerator, but he did not stop. He pressed the sole against my shoe and leaned enough weight onto it to make me scream.
“You think you can walk out on me?” he roared. “You’re nothing but trash without this house.”
When he finally stepped away, my foot had already begun swelling inside my sneaker. Every attempt to move sent a sharp pulse through my toes.
Greg stood over me as if the pain itself proved he was right.
“No one is going to believe you.”
That was what he had counted on for seven years.
He called control protection. He called isolation marriage. He called every bruise an accident I had caused by provoking him.
Then he crouched beside me and lowered his voice.
“You fell carrying groceries. You hit the cabinet. That’s what you tell the doctor.”
I looked at the broken eggs spreading across the floor.
Greg followed my gaze and smiled.
“The cast will keep you home long enough to remember where you belong.”
He thought he had broken the one thing I needed to leave him.
He did not know I had already placed my new apartment deposit.
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He did not know I was supposed to begin a new job on Monday.
And he did not know the podiatrist he chose from our insurance directory was a friend of my sister.
