“You didn’t run a background check on who you were marrying.”

Chapter 2: The Logic of the Mat

My father named me Alexandra. He said a girl needed to be as iron-willed as Alexander the Great to survive the world. The irony was that after gifting me the name, he became the primary force trying to break that iron.

When I was three, my father beat my mother so viciously she fled into the night with nothing but the clothes on her back. Like Tom, he ran on the primitive software that says women are livestock to be beaten into line.

Once his punching bag escaped, he redirected his drunken, festering hatred onto the only target left: me.

I was six. I learned to read his mood from the sound of his footsteps on the linoleum. He used his belt. He used his steel-toed work boots. He used his knuckles.

The contusions on my spine never fully healed. Through sweltering summers I wore heavy corduroy sweaters, terrified of exposing my skin. When kids at school asked, I recited the lie about falling off my bicycle.