The Silence Before
Chapter One There are things you remember with clarity, like a shard of glass stuck under skin—sharp, impossible to forget. And there are things your body remembers for you when your mind has gone quiet to survive. She was five when the silence began. It wasn’t a peaceful silence. It was the kind that falls heavy in a room where something awful has just happened. The kind of silence where the only sound left is the thundering of your own heartbeat, your breath caught somewhere between your chest and your throat. She didn’t have the words then, only the ache of knowing that something was wrong and the knowledge that she wasn’t allowed to say so. The grown-up who hurt her smiled in public. No one saw what he did when the door closed. No one noticed her flinch when he walked by. Children are supposed to be resilient, they said. She was just sensitive, they said. But her resilience wasn’t something she was born with. It was something she carved out of necessity, from bone and instinct. ...