“Look at her,” Amos crowed. “Pretty enough if you scrub her clean. And she don’t scream. Don’t beg. Ain’t that right, girl?” He shook her again, testing whether she would break. Lila let her body go still and heavy, the way she had learned to do on nights when his anger came home before he did.
She wasn’t deaf. She wasn’t broken in that way. But pretending to be deaf had made her invisible to the kind of cruelty that hunted words. Silence had become a locked door, and behind it she had kept the memory of her mother’s last breath, the sound of a chair overturning, and her father’s voice roaring like a storm inside their one-room shack.
Read more on the next page ⬇️⬇️⬇️
