She had not chosen this life. Yet here they were, pushing it further in the wrong direction.
He stood up.
"You want to talk about what you want?" His voice filled the small room. "Your mother died because of you, because you had to be born, and this is how you repay this family? You stand here in that dress and tell me you are tired?"
She had heard this before. The first time she was six years old and had cried for a week. The fifteenth time she was twelve and had stopped feeling it the same way. Now she simply stood and received it, the way a wall receives weather, without changing.
But he was already moving toward her.
"Toni wanted to marry you." His footsteps were heavy and unsteady, the floor responding under his weight. "Toni had money. Toni would have resolved this, but you, with your better plan, your city boy, your..."
"Father...."
The first blow caught her across the shoulder. She stumbled sideways and caught herself against the doorframe. The second came before she had straightened, his open palm against the side of her head, and the room shifted, a sharp ringing filling her left ear.
She went down.
Not all at once. Her knees found the floor first, then her hands, and her body moved instinctively before her mind caught up, curling inward and downward, both arms crossing over her abdomen, her hands pressing flat against the soft warmth there. A sound came from her that she had not planned, small and involuntary.
Not the baby. Not the baby. Not the baby.
The kicks came from behind. She curled tighter.
"Where does the money come from? Tell me how we eat! Tell me how your brother keeps his hand...."
"Father, stop..." Marcus's voice came from somewhere above her, slow and unsteady. "Father, that is enough, she needs to work, if you hurt her she cannot..."
She heard that. She heard exactly what her brother was saying, not stop because she is a person, not stop because she is your daughter lying on the floor of your mother's house, but stop because she needs to be physically capable of earning money for them.
She pressed her forehead against the cold floor and asked silently why it had always had to be her. Apart from these two, she had no one else. There were no other relatives. There was no one coming.
The blows stopped. She did not know whether it was Marcus or exhaustion that ended it. It did not matter.
What mattered was the stillness. Her own breathing, uneven and shallow. Broken glass nearby catching the light from the window. The faint sound of a neighbor's television coming through the wall.
Her hands were still pressed against her stomach.
Still here, she told the small, unnamed thing inside her. We are still here.
She did not know if that was a promise or simply a statement of current fact. Either way, she held onto it with everything she had remaining.
"Get up from down there."
Her father's voice had changed. The violence had finished itself. He was straightening his shirt now, smoothing it down with both hands, like a man who had completed something he considered necessary.
"Get dressed. I am going to find Toni. He has money and you would have a real husband rather than the city boy who gave you nothing and left you with nothing."
Daniella lay still for one more moment. Her cheek against the cool floorboards of her grandmother's house, the same floors her grandmother had swept every single morning, the same floors her mother had learned to walk on. From this angle she could see the dust gathered along the base of the wall. The edge of a broken bottle. Her own hand, still curved against her stomach.
Then she began to rise.
Slowly. Her ribs made their objections known. Her hip burned where the kicks had landed. She came up one part at a time, knee, palm, elbow, spine, and stood in the middle of the sitting room in her wrinkled white dress, and did not look at her father, and did not look at Marcus, and did not cry.
Crying would do nothing. She had tried it when she was younger and she knew what it did, it gave violence something to feed on.
She had taken three steps toward the hallway when the front door burst open.
Not knocked. Not pushed. It burst, the old wood slamming hard against the wall, sending the framed photograph above the sideboard jumping on its nail. Four men came through the door and filled the small room immediately, spreading into every available space without effort or announcement.
They moved with the flat, deliberate calm of men who had never once needed to make themselves known before entering a room.
The sitting room became very small.