The first thing Pamela noticed when she opened her eyes was the intense throbbing at her temple. The second was the broken glass in front of her on the entryway floor. Sudden realization flooded her and she realized he had done it again. "It must have been dinner," she thought to herself. She knew he would be angry that dinner was late, but it was only 15 minutes! It had taken her longer than she had expected at the grocery store this afternoon. She knew he was going to be angry.

Pamela slowly tried to sit up trying to ignore the dizziness she felt when her head lifted off of the white tile. Blood. That was going to make him angry too. As soon as she tried to lift herself to a sitting position pain shot down the right side of her hip making her gasp and lie back down. She was going to have to make it to the counter where the phone was and call an ambulance. That was also going to make him angry, but maybe she can figure something out while she’s at the hospital. Each inch that she slid had pain slicing through her hip as well as, she realized, her entire right leg.

How did this happen? It was so good in the beginning, he never hit her then, not at first. Not until the night he came home from work 6 months into the marriage and found a box of pizza on the counter with a note saying she was upstairs with a migraine. “you think you know what pain is? I’ll show you pain,” he’d said just before slapping her hard across the face three times. He had then drug her downstairs and made her fix him a full dinner. That was also the night he first raped her. Afterward, he held her while she cried and told her he was sorry, “I’m just really stressed out at work right now. I’ll never do that again. You know I love you,” he’d said. And she was naive enough to believe it.

 She finally reached the phone and dialed the number she had memorized for times like these. She memorized the direct number for the paramedics rather than dialing 911 because the first and only time she did that, the police came along with the paramedics. That had definitely made him angry. “I slipped on some glass and I think I broke my hip,” she told the dispatch operator. Then with tears in her eyes she lay back down and hoped the ambulance would get to her before he came back home.

As luck would have it, the paramedics arrived only minutes before he did. Oh, he was an actor at heart. He rushed to her side, roses in hand, and cradled her head asking her what had happened. But she knew. She recognized that look in his eyes was not concern for her. It was concern for himself and what she may have told them had happened. She closed her eyes, tears following a trail to her temple and mixing with the blood in her hair, “I slipped on the glass from the bowl I dropped in the entryway.” Relief flooded his face while fear flooded hers. “Don’t worry,” she thought to herself, “I wouldn’t want to make you angry.”