Every morning in our rundown Texas rental, my husband dragged me to the backyard, tied my hands to the porch pillar, and lashed my pregnant belly while yelling, “All you make is worthless daughters—you’re a broken wife!”

Elena signed only the first page.

Her hand shook so badly that the final letters collapsed into one another. When Derek pushed the second document toward her, she let the pen fall.

“I’m going to be sick.”

“Then be sick after you finish.”

A tightening spread across her abdomen. Elena bent over the kitchen table and breathed through it.

Martha watched from the stove.

“She’s pretending.”

“She’s thirty-seven weeks pregnant,” Callie said from the hallway.

Derek turned so quickly that Callie stepped backward.

Elena moved between them.

“She needs to get ready for school.”

Neither girl had attended school all week. Derek claimed the family car needed repairs, though his truck started every morning. In truth, he did not want teachers seeing the fading marks on Elena’s arms or hearing what the girls had witnessed.

Derek gathered the unsigned papers.

“You have until tonight.”

He left for a jobsite with Martha beside him. Before the truck disappeared, Martha looked back through the passenger window and tapped the metal tool against the glass.

Elena locked the door.

Callie ran to her first. Four-year-old June followed, carrying a faded pink blanket.

“Is the baby hurt?” Callie asked.

“I don’t know.”

Elena hated the answer, but she had stopped giving her daughters promises she could not keep.

The three of them lived in a two-bedroom rental on the edge of town, although Derek’s company had once renovated expensive ranch houses from Abilene to Sweetwater. He said rising material costs had destroyed the business. He blamed Elena’s pregnancies, medical bills, and inability to produce a son.

Before June’s birth, Elena had managed invoices from the kitchen table. Afterward, Derek changed the passwords and said she should focus on the children.

The electricity had been disconnected twice that year.

Yet Derek always carried cash.

Elena examined the page she had signed. It authorized her to confirm payroll records for the previous twenty-four months.

She opened the drawer where Derek kept old mail.

Most envelopes were addressed to him or Martha. Beneath them lay a certified letter she had never seen.

It came from the Texas Department of Insurance.

The letter warned that the workers’ compensation policy for Mercer Residential Restoration had expired eleven months earlier.

A second notice referred to a fatal workplace accident involving an employee named Travis Bell.

Elena remembered Travis.

He had fallen from a roof outside Clyde the previous spring. Derek told her another contractor employed him.

The letter said otherwise.

It identified Elena Mercer as the company owner responsible for providing payroll and safety records.