Normally, I would swallow the insult. I had spent twenty-eight years perfecting the art of shrinking myself to survive their psychological warfare. I would lower my head, let the cruelty wash over me, and wait for the dinner to end.
But tonight, something was different. I looked up and saw Travis watching me. He wasn’t smirking along with Chloe. His jaw was clenched, a muscle feathering near his ear. He looked at my father, who was nodding in silent agreement with my mother’s insult.
Something inside me, a tiny, glowing ember of self-respect that I had nurtured in secret for years, finally sparked.
“It’s not boring,” I said.
The words hung in the air, heavy and foreign. My mother’s head snapped toward me, her eyes widening in sheer outrage at my defiance.
“It matters,” I continued, my voice shaking slightly, but my posture straightening. “I help kids who have nobody else. I help them survive the exact kind of people who think they are worthless.”
The dining room plunged into a silence so cold and heavy it felt dangerous. The air pressure seemed to drop. My father slowly placed his wine glass down. Chloe stared at me with pure, unadulterated venom.
“Excuse me?” my mother whispered, her voice dropping to a lethal, terrifying register.
As I braced myself for the inevitable, brutal verbal lashing, my heart hammering against my ribs, I had absolutely no idea that my mother was already reaching behind her. Resting maliciously on the ornate wooden sideboard, left behind by a plumber earlier that afternoon, was a heavy, rusted iron pipe wrench.
