Jasmine’s Reviews > Night Milk > Status Update

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.