Last night my son h.i.t me and I didn’t cry. This morning I got out the nice tablecloth, served breakfast like on special occasions, and when he came downstairs smiling he said, “So you finally learned your lesson”… until he saw who was waiting for him at my table.

I stood with one hand on the counter, listening to the hum of the refrigerator while Wyatt glanced at me for a second and then simply shrugged his shoulders. He went up to his room and slammed the door, leaving me alone with a burning cheek and the realization that I was no longer safe.

At one in the morning, I picked up my phone and called the only man I didn’t want to call, but knew I absolutely had to.

“Leona?” Harrison answered with a sleepy voice from his home in Colorado.

“Wyatt hit me,” I said, and once those words were out, I knew there was no going back to the way things were.

There was a heavy silence on the other end of the line before he spoke with a firmness I hadn’t heard in many years.

“I am getting on a flight and I am going there right now,” he promised.

I didn’t sleep at all that night, and at four in the morning, I started cooking a massive breakfast of biscuits, gravy, bacon, and strong coffee. I took out the good holiday dishes and spread the embroidered lace tablecloth over the table because I had made a final decision.

Shortly before six, Harrison arrived at the house looking older and wearing a dark coat with a brown leather folder tucked under his arm. He didn’t ask any silly questions, but instead looked at my face and my trembling hands and understood everything immediately.

“Is he still upstairs?” he asked quietly.

“He is asleep,” I replied while I looked at the table I had prepared.

“You always cooked like this when you were about to change something big in our lives,” Harrison noted as he took a seat.

“This ends today, Harrison,” I said, feeling for the first time in months that someone truly saw my pain.

“So tell me just one thing, Leona, are you really leaving this house today?” he asked as he stepped closer.

I thought of Wyatt as a little boy with scraped knees and then I thought of the man who hit me last night, and I knew what I had to do.

“Yes, today is the day,” I said before we both heard the stairs creak as Wyatt began to walk down.

Wyatt walked into the kitchen yawning and disheveled, his arrogance still fully intact despite what he had done the night before. He saw the set table and smiled with a sense of superiority as he reached for a biscuit without asking.

“Well, it is about time you figured out how things should be done in this house,” he said.