Total pages in book: 105
Estimated words: 101662 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 508(@200wpm)___ 407(@250wpm)___ 339(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 101662 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 508(@200wpm)___ 407(@250wpm)___ 339(@300wpm)
His father, Jack, never laid a hand on Henry. He never understood why, but I knew the moment I’d met Jack Hughes. That man adored other men; it was women he found fault in. Jack thought his gender was the smarter of the two and that a woman’s place was in the kitchen or on her knees—Jack’s words, not mine. If misogyny was a person, his name was Jack Hughes. I’m not saying Jack was attracted to men; he just didn’t like women that much. He looked down on the whole sex in such a demeaning way. As a therapist myself, I could’ve gone into all the reasons why he was the way he’d been, but just because people had reasons for the way they were didn’t mean that they had excuses.
I had the firm belief that if we excused people from their actions due to their personal traumas, we’d end up with a domino effect of passing on trauma to every single person. Even with his reasons, they didn’t excuse Jack for his harmful ways.
When I first met him—the first and last time before he died—he told me I was a wasted seed unless I gave Henry another child. In his head, the only reason for a woman’s existence was to bear children for the man to raise. Jack called me a weak, stupid woman when I mentioned I wasn’t certain I wanted to have children. Henry cussed him out for the comment, yelling so loudly that his veins were popping out of his neck. I’d never seen a man so angry, and a part of me felt protected in that moment. He stood up for me to the man who raised him, the man he’d always feared. That felt important. It made me feel safe.
Henry apologized to me the whole ride home. He told me he never wanted me to see him lose his temper like that—where rage met the deepest forms of heartache. That was the first time I’d seen him cry. I remembered him falling apart once we got to the house, and him wrapping me in his arms, telling me that he never wanted me to see him in such an angry state. That he never wanted to raise his voice toward anyone, like his father had done Henry’s whole life.
Oddly enough, Jack seemed proud of his son for standing up to him—for shouting the same way Jack seemed to shout at Henry’s mother, Tamera. He smirked as if thinking, “That’s my boy.” That’s why I figured Jack never laid a finger on Henry—because he held a part of his DNA. His poor wife, however, was a punching bag.
We didn’t go to the funeral for Jack. All Henry did was light a cigar and smoke it on the back patio the night of his father’s service. “I hope he burns down there,” Henry muttered before putting out his cigar.
It took years for Henry to lose his temper again.
We started visiting his mother a lot more. To this day, Ava still visited with Tamera every weekend. The two were as close as close could be, and I loved that. I loved Tamera. Even with everything she’d been through, her heart never hardened. If anything, after Jack’s passing, she found ways to give more love away.
Over time, I’d noticed during our visits that Henry began to nitpick things about Tamera’s home. How unorganized it had been and how old-fashioned the property was. He offered time and time again to buy her a new house or to renovate her current one, but she wasn’t interested. That only annoyed Henry more. Tamera didn’t think much of it and waved off her son’s demeaning comments. Sure, Tamera was a bit of a hoarder, but she seemed comfortable with her collections. She knew exactly where everything was, too.
I think after Jack’s passing, she went out and bought everything that her husband told her she could never have. I thought it was fine and brave to live fully as herself after years of being a shadow to a man’s wrath. Who was I to tell her how to live her life? I figured women who lost so much of themselves to a man deserved happiness more than most—no matter how it looked to others.
One night Henry asked me to come over and help organize Tamera’s home. He said it wasn’t safe for Ava to be staying over there when there was so much junk.
What he called junk, Tamera called treasures.
The two ended up in a big argument, and I saw Henry explode at his mother, leaving her in tears. I’d never seen him blow up at a person like that, not even when he shouted at his father. Even when he saw her crack, he kept yelling, bringing a newfound fear to me. He broke one of Tamera’s vases in his fit of rage and told her he didn’t understand how his father put up with her.