When I came home late from work, my husband slapped me and screamed, “Do you know the time, you useless bi:tch? Get in the kitchen and cook for my mother!” I cooked for an hour, only for her to take one bite, spit it out, and shove me so hard I started bleeding—I knew I was losing the baby. I reached for my phone to call 911. My husband threw it away. I looked him in the eye and said, “Call my father.” They had no idea who he really was.

Panic gave me strength. I started to crawl toward my phone lying on the table. Inch by inch, every movement a new wave of pain. My fingertips almost reached it when Dave stepped down hard on my hand, pinning it to the tile.

I gasped. Tears blurred everything.

He bent, picked up my phone himself, and tossed it across the kitchen like it was trash.

It hit the wall and broke apart, the screen going dark—my last lifeline erased in a single casual motion.

The room narrowed into a tunnel of pain, and the only thing inside it was Dave’s face.

“No one is coming to save you,” he said.

I stared up at him and felt something inside me go strangely calm—not because I wasn’t terrified, but because my mind finally stopped begging him to be a different man.

My thoughts tore through every exit, every option… and landed on the one person Dave had always mocked and underestimated.

“Call my father,” I rasped.

Dave threw his head back and laughed. “Your father?” he sneered. “That dirt-under-the-nails, vegetable-growing old man? What’s he going to do—throw a tomato at me?”

I didn’t answer his joke. I just held his gaze and forced the words out again.

“Call. Him.”