the pipe’s own neighborhood, it’s going to come bursting out. When he was himself, he was moody and unpredictable, made worse for all the hours he’d pretended he wasn’t.”
“Was he violent?” Kris’s question was quiet.
“Not to me or mum. But he’d bring men home, accomplices for bigger jobs, and sometimes his fists did the talking. And sometimes . . .”
Kris tightened his hold on her. “Sometimes?”
“Come on,” she said, and took him to where it first happened. It looked the same, just with bigger trees around the park’s edges. “I used to cut through here after dark on the way home from the lake district. One night, when I was fourteen, I was in my tidy black and whites after pretending to be a waitress on her break and doing a currency exchange scam on new tourists. Usually the worst thing in the park was a couple of teenagers putting the shadows to use.” She hesitated, finding the memory still too soft to touch without bruising. The blinding pain in her ribs; the blood she hadn’t known how to get out of that white blouse—not with her mother long gone.
Kris waited, his thumb stroking the back of her hand.
“That night, two guys were waiting for me. They called me that bastard Harvey’s girl. I was so terrified I didn’t even try to run as they beat me up. It was over quickly, but it felt like forever, and even though I’d never seen the men in my life, I couldn’t stop imagining it was my dad doing it.”
Kris looked winded as he stared at her, mouth open, hand on his abdomen.
“After, I was so disoriented, they had to shove me in the right direction to get home, suggesting I tell my dad that’s what he got for skimming their cut.”
She’d found her way, blind from swelling in one eye, ribs too damaged to cry.
“That night, he gave me these.” With her free hand, she snapped open her purse—Hanna’s purse—and fished out her brass knuckles. “They ended up coming in handy.”
“Jesus,” Kris muttered, hand running over his mouth.
Her father had slid them across the sticky dining table and said, For next time.
Not, Are you okay?
Not, I’m so sorry, Frankie.
Not, I’ll make sure this never happens again.
“He told me to cut my hair,” she continued, closing the purse again. “Said they’d use it to drag me down. And that I shouldn’t let them get me on the ground, because I was old enough to know what happened next and for them to want to do it.”
“Fuck. Oh, fuck.” Kris’s eyes were bleak. “I’m so sorry, Frankie.”
She raised a shoulder, looking away. “He taught me how to fight. Street rules.” Dirty moves and fast relentless strikes. “It only just helped, so I pulled extra jobs after school”—plucking wallets and short-changing cashiers—“and took every self-defense and martial arts class I could find.”
She’d never taken a beating for her hateful father again.
“There’s more,” she said, because he needed to know everything a journalist might dig up. Based on the way he held her hand, his elbow tucked around hers to keep her close to his side, his mind was far from royal practicalities. “If you want to see.”
“Everything. Show me everything.”
So they kept walking. She took him to her old school, the self-defense studio where she’d got her first legal job as a trainer, and the hostel she’d lived in for the better part of two years.
“It doesn’t look safe.” Kris eyed the backpackers’ hostel in concern. The kind of place that crawled with young tourists who’d left their decency balled up in a drawer at home.
“The owners got to know me,” she said. “They looked out for me. Gave me one of the single rooms with a new lock on it. I told them I was in college, not high school, and paid every week, so they pretended to believe me. Besides, I could handle myself.”
Kris stared at the building for a long time. The downstairs common room was a mess of hollers and raucous laughter, and a sudden uproar of singing petered out drunkenly when the participants seemed to realize none of them really knew the words. The crash of glass bottles being emptied into a waste container travelled from the back alley, and there were unmistakable groans escaping an open second-level window.
It wasn’t the place for a sixteen-year-old runaway to put herself through school.
“Okay,” he said quietly, something broken in his voice.
They kept walking. It was late now, the dull beat of