Status Updates From Night Milk

But we are here. We are together. We are beginning. And the beginning is enough.

"She was training me to be someone's perfect Christian wife. Turns out the skills transfer."

My mother loved a monster and the monster used the love to break her. Eve is loved by a monster and the monster is using the love to break everything that ever touched her.

I love her.

The thought arrives and I don't fight it. There's no point in fighting it. The wall is down. The room is open. Whatever I've spent twenty-three years constructing — the architecture of detachment, the system of sealed compartments, the clean, efficient, emotionless machine that calls itself Nathan Cross — it's been breached.

"Are you doing this?" I say. "The church women."

"Do you want me to stop, Eve?" he says.

And somewhere between the eggs and the milk and the names on my screen, I'll keep dismantling the world that hurt her. Bolt by bolt. Name by name. Until there's nothing left.

She doesn't know that the first name on her list has been crossed off. She sits on her stool and eats the food I made and her bare feet dangle above the hardwood and she has no idea that the man across the counter from her drove to Canaan tonight and put a bullet in a woman's chest and then bought her peaches.

The answer is that I positioned myself as a barrier without telling her because telling her would require explaining why I care whether she's protected and I don't have that explanation yet.

The answer is that I sleep on the couch because the couch is between the front door and the hallway to her room. The answer is that if anyone came through that door — if her father hired someone, if the police tracked the car, if any threat at all materialized in the night — I'd be the first thing between them and her.

The awareness that she's sitting shirtless on a couch with a man she met in a parking lot two weeks ago and her hand is on his face and she's looking at his mouth and the distance between this moment and everything she was taught about purity and restraint and the proper behavior of a pastor's daughter is so vast that it's vertigo-inducing.

I ask if anyone is looking for me specifically and he says "Not effectively." I ask what that means and he says nothing and returns to his office and closes the door.

If I could finish this book in one sitting I would. It’s been SO long since I’ve felt consumed by a book.

Her face on the screen. A photo I recognize from the church's website — younger, fuller, smiling the practiced smile of a pastor's daughter in a blue dress. The girl in the photo and the girl in my kitchen are the same person the way a building and its demolition are the same building. Technically connected. Structurally unrecognizable.

Someone broke something that is in my apartment and the thing they broke is still breaking and the part of my brain that solves problems is already spinning up, already mapping, already asking: who did this, where are they, how do I reach them, what does it cost to make them stop existing.

"You could be anyone," she says. "You could be worse than them."

"I could be."

"That's not reassuring."

"I'm not trying to reassure you. I'm trying to give you a choice. Right now you don't have one. I'm offering one."

"You're standing in a hospital lot with no shoes, no money, and no plan. Your mother will be here in six hours. She'll find your room empty. She'll call your father. Your father will call every person in Canaan who owes him a favor. That's everyone. You have a six-hour head start. You can spend it walking barefoot down a county road, or you can get in the car."

"I want to offer you a ride," I say.

"I don't get in cars with men I don't know."

"You don't know anyone.

Most people can't read me. I've spent twenty years making sure of it. She's doing it in a parking lot in hospital slippers.

She stares at me. Doesn't run. Doesn't speak. She's calculating — I can see it happening behind her eyes with a speed that impresses me. Risk versus necessity. Threat versus opportunity. She's in pain and exhausted and standing in a parking lot with nowhere to go and she's running the math instead of panicking.

I look at this woman and I see load-bearing rage dressed in a hospital gown, and the structure is sound.

She is a twenty-year-old woman walking out of a hospital in the middle of the night with nothing but a blanket and a body that hasn't finished bleeding and she's moving with the kind of determination that I recognize.

If that's God's plan, then God and I are finished negotiating.

No. The word is quiet but it's structural. It's load-bearing. It holds up everything that comes after it.

I lie in the dark and I memorize their names the way I used to memorize scripture — completely, permanently, by heart.

I am screaming because my body is being split apart from the inside and there is no one here who can help me and the only hands touching me belong to women who locked me in this room and took my phone and told me it was love.

Because I am screaming. I want to be clear about that. Whatever image exists of women giving birth in graceful silence, biting down on a rag, being brave — that is not what is happening in this room.

He has given me to my mother the way he gives everything domestic to my mother, the way the church gives its messes to the women's ministry. The men build the institution. The women clean up the blood.