He Hits You? Suck It Up So I Locked Them in With My Abusive Husband novel · Chapter 19 of 24

Chapter 19: What Diane Made

"Play the rest," Diane said again. "No. I'll tell it myself."

She walked around the table to the sideboard and stood beside me, with her back to the forty faces.

She took the steel bottle out of her handbag and set it on the cloth between the cake and the candles.

"This," she said to the room. "You all know what this is for now."

Nobody answered.

"My husband beat me for forty years," she said.

A murmur ran along the table and died.

"You knew," she said. "Every one of you over sixty knew. You came to our house and ate my roast and watched me pour his whiskey."

The men in blazers looked at their hands.

"I wore long sleeves in August. I had my jaw wired in 1994. You said, poor man, he can't hold his liquor."

Her voice was quite steady.

It was the steadiness I knew from the inside.

"Do you know what the drink did for him?" she said. "It made him a sick man. People brought him casseroles. The church sat with him when he dried out. When he was sorry, the whole county forgave him."

"Diane," the old woman beside the uncle said. "We didn't"

"You did. The only thing that was ever forgiven in that house was the drink."

She turned and looked at the cake.

"Nobody ever forgave me for anything. Nobody ever noticed that I was there."

"So you gave Conway the same thing," I said.

She turned her head.

"He came to me at twenty-two," she said. "There was a girl, before you. She had a bruise, and he had blood on his knuckles. He was crying. He didn't know what he was."

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