behaved, how immaculate, how she never misbehaved or answered back, or challenged her parents. As did her teachers, her parents’ friends talked about her lovely hair, her huge blue eyes, how rarely she spoke. Her grades were excellent, and although her teachers lamented the fact that she seldom spoke up in class, and only answered questions in class when directly pressed to do so, she was nonetheless far ahead of most of the other children her age. She read constantly, and had learned early. Just as her early writing did, the books she read transported her to another world, light-years away from her own. She loved reading, and now when her mother wanted to torment her, she threw away her books, and took her pencils and paper away from her. She was always quick to discover what meant the most to her, and to seal off all of Gabriella's avenues of escape. But when that happened, Gabriella sat lost in thought, dreaming. In the ways that mattered, at least, they could no longer touch her, though they never noticed. And for reasons Gabriella herself couldn't explain, she knew instinctively now that she was a survivor.
Eloise often had Gabriella help in the kitchen, scrubbing, or washing dishes, or polishing silver. She complained that Gabriella was still intolerably spoiled, and owed it to them to make herself useful somewhere in the house. She did her own laundry, changed her sheets, cleaned her own room, and bathed and dressed herself. She was never allowed to be idle for a single moment, unlike other children her age, who were left to play outdoors, or in their own rooms, and given books or toys to entertain them. Gabriella's life was still a constant battle for survival, and as she grew older, the ante was upped frequently, the rules changed on a daily basis. Her skill lay in deciphering her mother's threats, determining her mood of the hour, and striving constantly not to annoy her, doing everything possible not to incur her fury.
The beatings still occurred just as frequently, but she was in school for longer now, which mercifully kept her away from home for more hours every day. And inevitably, the sins she was accused of committing were more serious as she grew older. Forgotten homework, lost articles of clothing, breaking a plate when she was doing dishes in the kitchen. She knew better than to make excuses for her crimes. She just braced herself and took what came. She was artful at hiding the bruises in school, from teachers and the few children she played with. She kept to herself most of the time. She couldn't see the children after school anyway, her mother would never have allowed another child in the house to visit. It was bad enough, as far as Eloise was concerned, having Gabriella underfoot to destroy the house, she had no intention of inviting other children in to help her. One child to endure was bad enough. Yet another was inconceivable torture to her.
Only twice in her three years in school had teachers observed something wrong with Gabriella. Once her uniform had slipped up her thigh while jumping rope at recess, and they had seen the appalling bruises on her legs. When questioned, she had explained that she'd fallen off her bike in her parents’ garden, and after sympathizing with her over the enormity of the bruise and how much it must have hurt when it happened, they let it go and forgot about it. The second time had been at the start of the current school year. Both her arms had been badly bruised and one of her wrists had been sprained. Her face, as was almost always the case, was remarkably untouched, her eyes innocent as she explained a bad fall from a horse over the weekend. They had excused her from doing homework until her wrist got better, but she couldn't explain that to her mother when she got home that night, so she did the homework anyway, and turned it in at school in the morning.
Her father remained as uninvolved as he had always been. And in the past two years, he seemed to spend most of his time away. He was traveling for the bank, and Gabriella knew that something untoward had happened between her parents, although it had never been clear to her exactly when it had occurred, or what it was. But for the past six months, they had had separate bedrooms, and