He told me he would build me a house with a hundred windows someday.

“You won’t have to be tired anymore,” he’d promised.

I wrote about that promise, then about the morning he struck me.

I did not call him a monster.

I did not excuse him because he’d once been a child I adored.

I wrote that the assault was his choice and that I would not return to an environment where I was threatened or denied the right to breathe clean air.

I asked him to stop representing my payments as gifts and to communicate about the property note through Marcus.