Let’s Keep It Realhe shouted, while Mikey wailed in his crib. “My mother spends all day with your child, and you can’t even make tea right!” Marina stood still.
Her hand in her robe pocket found the phone. She hit record. “My child?” she repeated quietly.
Quietly enough that he would say it louder. “Yes, your child. Because you’re useless.”
Eleanor sat in the armchair watching her son with approval. She didn’t interrupt. She was enjoying herself.
That night Marina listened back through the recordings. There were more than twenty now. Eleanor’s voice refusing to help.
Her husband’s voice yelling in front of the baby. Mikey crying in the background. She opened her banking app and took screenshots of every transfer.
Then she found a legal aid website and wrote down the questions she wanted to ask. She had two months until the CPS follow-up. In that time she had to gather enough proof to turn the whole thing around, to show who the real danger in that house was.
She was almost asleep when she remembered something odd. Earlier that day she had seen Eleanor coming out of the bedroom. Their bedroom, where Marina had left her purse.
Sleep vanished instantly. Marina got up, crept into the hall, and pulled her purse from the closet. She opened the inside pocket.
The photograph was gone. An old photo she had kept as a reminder that she had survived once before and could survive again. It showed Marina three years earlier, standing outside a clinic in another state.
That was where she had been treated for depression, where she had once been under psychiatric care. No one knew about it. Not Kyle, and certainly not his mother.
Marina had never told a soul. She stood in the dark hallway clutching the empty purse and understood. Eleanor had found the photo.
Eleanor had started digging. And if she really did have connections everywhere, the way she liked to say, then soon she would know everything. Marina went back to bed and lay there staring into the dark until dawn.
The fear didn’t go away. It only sharpened. But now something else was mixed in with it—something like resolve. She was going to learn how to fight.
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