Every morning was the same.
First came the slap.
Not always hard enough to leave a mark where people could see it, but hard enough to turn my face, hard enough to make my ears ring, hard enough to remind me that in Blake Carter’s house, my body was not my own.
Then came his voice.
“You hear me, Evelyn? I married you for a family. And what did you give me?”
I would stand barefoot on the cold kitchen tile in our farmhouse outside Franklin, Tennessee, holding the edge of the counter because I had learned that falling only made him angrier.
“Nothing,” he would answer for me. “A useless wife. A woman who can’t even give her husband a son.”
Sometimes his mother, Darlene, sat at the breakfast table with her coffee, pretending to scroll through her phone while she listened.
She never stopped him.
Not once.
She would only sigh and say, “A man has a right to be disappointed.”
That was how my mornings began for nearly four years.
By the time the sun lifted over the pasture and painted the barns gold, I had already swallowed tears, washed blood from my lip, and put on a clean blouse so the neighbors would think the Carter house was peaceful.
From the outside, it looked beautiful.
White porch.
Blue shutters.
