safety as the reason. But the truth was, he’d take any excuse to exert more control over my life. He’d never had much respect for my job at the theatre. Probably because it paid shit wages, and he was dying for me to get out of his hair.
“Well maybe I’ll just call Rachel to confirm that.” He pointed at where my cell phone rested screen-down on the table and only showed the colorful music notes on the deep green case.
“Dan.” My mom’s voice was horribly weak and deferent, almost as if she were afraid to speak up against him. Which, of course she was. The man was horrible, terrifying. The worst kind of alpha male mixed in with what I swore were sociopathic tendencies.
I had no idea why she’d married him. No wait, that wasn’t true. I understood it, in a way. When they’d first met, Dan had been different, though I’d always sensed an undercurrent of something off. He’d wined and dined my mom, made her feel like a million bucks when she’d been lonely and depressed before. And then, slowly, almost so slowly that it was hard to spot at first, he began to change. The small snide critiques of her figure. The random comments about other women flirting with him. The slow and methodical alienation from her other friends. He made her think she needed him and that she was lucky to have him, when really it was the other way around.
And now she was trapped.
I wasn’t even sure she realized it, but I did. And that was why he hated me.
He dropped his fork on his plate and levelled his eyes across the table. Immediately, she flicked her gaze down to the flowery tablecloth, something she’d only bought since Dan came along. Before she’d met him, she wouldn’t have been caught dead buying anything so feminine.
“Now, listen, Adeline. You said yourself that Norah needs to have some more discipline in her life if she’s going to freeload off of us like this.” He gripped the edges of the table, his eyebrows furrowing. Anger simmered off of him, like his body was full of a darkness so profound that it couldn’t hold all of it inside of him.
“I’m not freeloading,” I said. One thing I’d learned over the years: don’t talk back to Dan. But sometimes, like now, I couldn’t help myself, particularly when that rage was directed toward my mother. “I pay rent on my room.”
He sneered, taking his attention away from my mom and placing it firmly on me. “You give us two hundred bucks a month. Do you know how much this apartment costs? Electricity? Cable? Internet? And let’s not forget this damn food.” He pointed at the cast iron skillet in the middle of the table, full to the brim with a delicious paella my mom had made from scratch. A dish that none of us were enjoying because of the dark tension in the room. “We live in Manhattan, for fuck’s sake.”
“Dan,” came my mom’s pleading voice. “Please. Let’s not use that kind of language in front of Norah.”
“She’s eighteen years old, Adeline, and she’s a high school graduate. You need to stop babying her. I’m fucking tired of her freeloading with no consequences. She either needs to get another job or get out.” He shoved his finger at the paella. “Now serve me some of that food, or I’ll start packing up her shit right now.”
“Dan.” My mom’s eyes had gone glassy, and her knuckles were snow white where she gripped the napkin in her lap. “I think that’s enough. Norah is my daughter, and she’s not going anywhere. Not until she decides it’s time and she has the means to support herself.”
I sucked in a sharp breath and sat up straight in the stiff dining chair. Well, this was certainly a first. Mom never stood up to Dan, not even when he transformed into the inner beast we both knew was beneath the handsome face.
His face darkened, and his voice dropped into a strange, eerie, quiet calm. “You pay less a month than she does, Adeline.”
A quiet threat, one that made my mom blink in shock. I’d seen him do this before. Any time it might seem that Mom was grasping for some kind of control over a situation, Dan would turn the tables on her before she’d managed to find her feet. I didn’t believe for a second he would ever kick her out, and maybe Mom didn’t either,