Chapter 13 Feel The Stiff Rod Beneath My Butt

• I’m breathing like I’ve just run a hundred circles around the barn. Not only because he’s making me restless, yearning for something I can’t even name, but because I’ve never had a confidant. Someone on my side. My heart has climbed into my throat in response to his defensiveness of me and the words just spill out. “I ran from my father,”
• I say, laying my cheek on his shoulder. “He treated me like a servant, sending me out to tend the farm at five o’clock in the morning. He worked me until I collapsed. I wasn’t allowed to have friends or my own money or go anywhere by myself. My food was rationed according to his moods.
• My step mother tried to intervene when I was younger, but he bullied the life out of her and eventually she just became silent. If he didn’t approve of my work on the farm, I was sent to sleep in the barn.”