I remember thinking that this was not an argument anymore.
This was the thing I had spent years telling myself he would never actually do.
Then he pulled again.
The hallway came toward me sideways.
My cheek hit the wall, and the framed family photo beside us dropped, shattered, and scattered our smiling faces across the runner.
That was when I heard my father laugh.
Douglas Kensington stood in his bedroom doorway, half in shadow, wearing plaid pajama pants and an old college T-shirt from a school he never stopped bragging about.
He did not ask what was happening.
He did not say Aaron’s name with warning in it.
He smiled as if the house had finally become entertaining.
“Look at this,” he said. “Madison at it again. Always the victim.”
There are sentences that bruise deeper than hands.
