The sound of the bat still echoed in her ears as she walked into the kitchen, breath shallow, heart pounding with the wild calm that comes only after violence. She expected guilt, excuses, maybe tears. Instead, she found her husband casually flipping through a magazine, his face lighting up as if nothing in the world was wrong. When he mentioned her parents, the room tilted; her fingers went numb around the glass she’d just poured. In a single instant, every certainty turned to ash. The image of those four legs under the blanket rewrote itself in her mind, now carrying the unbearable weight of what she might have done. Her fury, once so justified, curdled into a horror she couldn’t name. Between the kitchen and the bedroom lay a silence she might never be able to cros