Chapter 1 — The Porch

My handbag landed on the concrete beside me, thrown there by my own father, and he stood over me in the doorway of the house that was legally mine and told me to go ahead and call whoever I wanted.

I want to tell this part carefully, because I have decided, in the telling, not to relive the worst few minutes of that morning inch by inch.

You do not need me to walk you slowly across that kitchen floor.

It is enough to say what happened, plainly, the way it will one day be read into a record: that my father came into my home uninvited, told me to get out, put his hands on me when I refused, and dragged me out onto that porch by my hair while his young wife stood in my kitchen and laughed.

I was eight months pregnant.

When I came down on the concrete, my water broke.

So that is the shape of it, and I will leave the rest of the choreography where it belongs, which is behind me.

What I want you to understand is the one thing I knew with total certainty, even sitting soaked and shaking on that porch with my scalp on fire: that the house behind him was mine.

Not his.

Not the bank’s.

Mine.

My father had walked into my life that morning absolutely certain of a great many things, and almost none of them turned out to be true.

I am telling you this from a long way past it, with my daughter asleep in the next room and the whole nightmare closed and filed.

So let me say now what I could not have promised then: we were all right.

She was all right.

Hold onto that while I tell you how close it came.

I have thought a great deal, since, about why I felt so certain in that moment — soaked, injured, in early labor, thrown out of my own home — that the house behind my father was mine and not his.