Chapter 1

T he front door crashed open and struck the wall before slamming shut again, the sound reverberating up through the floorboards.

In her bed, Ember froze, her breathing still deep and slow as if she were sleeping, but her body alert, every muscle, tendon, and sinew tense, ready.

There was always the dilemma of what to do when Bruno came home from a night out. Pretend to sleep and hope he would let her continue the charade, or get up and brace herself for whatever mood he was in. There were only those two choices, and whichever she chose depended on how brave or aggrieved she was feeling.

She could usually predict his temper by his tread on the stairs. Light and eager meant he'd had a win on the horses, or someone had flirted with him. Slow and heavy meant watch out . Sometimes there were no footsteps at all, and she'd find him flaked out on the couch in the lounge, stewed and snoring, all stale beer breath and sweat patches. That was always better.

Tonight, she couldn't tell what his tread meant. Still, she could deal with it, whatever it was going to be. It was going to be the last time, after all.

The bedroom door creaked open, and she took heart from that. At least he was giving the illusion of being conciliatory. He undressed, the mattress tilting under his weight. She waited for his meaty hand to crawl across the blankets like a fleshy spider to feast upon her, but he simply lay down. His breathing soon became as slow and even as hers, but she could tell something was off. Usually, Bruno's sleeping filled the room with snuffles and snorts, the churning of digestive acids, and the trumpeting of boozy farts that made the sheets reek. This morning however, he lay in silence.

Slowly, she turned her head on the pillow and cracked an eye.

He was staring straight at her.

The early morning light made his face look grey and drawn. The good looks that had first attracted her to him were long gone, hidden under red veined, bloated flesh and a layer of stubborn discontent.

"I knew you were awake." He sounded pleased with himself. "Can't fool me."

She made a show of yawning, made her voice slow and sleepy. "Hi, baby. Did you have a good night?"

"Too hot," he grumbled. "Hotter than custard."

Which didn't really make sense, but she wasn't about to argue. Temperatures had been soaring lately. Old Mrs Hughes from the school had fainted inside her parked car and would have died if two kids walking past hadn't seen her slumped over the wheel and dragged her out. Authorities had banned open fires for months now, although some had started spontaneously. There was that farm out west with the compost heap that had gone up, taking out three acres of dry grass before dying out at a creek bed. It was a miracle, the fire chief said on the tv news. Beside him, the farmer had a mixed look of shame and pride on his face—shame for the fire he'd caused, pride that it hadn't turned the entire town to ash.

Every day dawned a hard bright blue and every day the air conditioner rattled and sputtered, and she prayed it wouldn't break down altogether because they really couldn't afford to fix it. Every day except today, of course. It wouldn't be her problem soon.

Bruno reached for her and slurred, "Come on now, it's not time to get up yet" which she correctly interpreted as "let's fuck", and mentally sighed, preparing for another round of inept grabbing and pounding and occasionally, pain.

He rolled onto her, his wet mouth sucking at her cheek, having missed her mouth entirely, and she flinched as stale breath whooshed over her, smelling intriguingly of whiskey and popcorn. He yanked up her nightie. She opened her legs and there was a stretch of fumbling as he tried to enter her, but he couldn't. She lay still.

"Come on," he muttered, rubbing himself, trying to get hard, his hand banging uselessly against her thigh.

"It's okay," she whispered, but perhaps she shouldn't have said anything at all. His hand shot from his limp dick to her throat, and he shook her, before clipping the side of her face. It had all happened so fast that she didn't have time to move aside, and the blow made her eyes water. She scrambled away from him, out of bed, out of reach, and he collapsed back onto the rumpled sheets.

"Your fault," he told her. "Ugly bitch. Whore."

She crouched in between the bed and the wall, the sting of his words hurting more than the slap did, as they always did. There was a gurgling snore and she let out a shaky breath, her hand creeping up to cradle her throbbing cheek.

The light coming through the window had turned from grey to golden, and the glass looked as though it was rippling - but no, it was the air outside. It was shimmering, turning the view of next door's oak trees into a hazy mist, with tendrils of fog creeping out of the shadowy places among the leaves. She squinted. It was as though there were a pair of eyes looking at her, as green as emeralds, turning her inside out.

She shook her head, clearing it. The slap must've been harder than she'd thought.

She waited a few minutes more before crawling out and grabbing her clothes, placed ready on the rocking chair. She changed in the bathroom, snuck back into the room, filched his jeans and jacket, and went through his pockets in the hallway. Usually, she only took the coins and small crumpled notes, the ones he was less likely to notice, but this time, the last time, she took the lot, fifty-seven dollars and eighty-five cents. She slipped the wallet in her pocket too, intending to dump it in a bin in town.

Back in the bedroom, she dropped his clothes on the floor where he'd left them. Next—and this was the bit she'd lovingly turned over in her mind for days now—she took his phone, held it to his face to unlock it, and swiped a hard factory reset. She replaced the phone in his jacket pocket and scuttled out the door, heart pounding so hard she could hear the blood thrumming in her ears, her smile so wide it made her swollen jaw ache.

The car started first try, which she took as a good omen. She drove to the swimming complex and parked under the largest tree, ostensibly for shade, but the weather was so warm it was likely pointless. The beater wasn't actually hers. It belonged to Bruno, and she'd known about the tracker tucked into the spare tyre compartment for months now. He wouldn't notice anything different—if he could even get into his phone to check on her at all. Ember was just going to work as she always did.

There was enough time to loosen up with a few lengths of the main pool, and she soon settled into a rhythm. Her mind drifted as her body ploughed up and down the lane, muscles flexing and straining, heart pumping. Swimming was always a release, a time of liminal space between the heavy burden of home and the energetic bubbly time spent at work.

Her new art school wasn't far from the coast. Maybe she could take a trip to the beach and swim in the ocean. She'd never seen the ocean in real life before, never tasted its salt on her lips, never fought for balance against relentless, pounding waves. Her money wouldn't go far, though. She couldn't go spending it all on day-tripping and excursions. She'd have to get a job somewhere, a room in a boarding house, maybe. Her hard-won scholarship would pay for her fees and there was enough left over to pay for basic food and utilities, but to have some kind of life, she'd need to get a part-time job.

Too keyed up to finish her customary thirty laps, she got out of the pool and went to the changing room to put on her swim instructor tee. Although her cheek still felt tender, she couldn't see a mark in the mirror. There was nothing to say that Bruno had laid hands on her again. She was grateful for that. Explaining bruises away was easy but strained the limits of belief sometimes. The sympathetic looks from her colleagues made her feel uneasy, as if she were wrong somehow, not quite fitting into the world like they did.

The other swim instructors arrived and then Jan, as hard-faced and volatile as her cousin Bruno, conducted the morning meeting. It was because of her that Ember had bothered coming in at all. If she'd ditched work altogether, Jan would call Bruno, wanting to know where she was. But today, Ember's last two students had cancelled. Jan didn't know. Ember hadn't told her. And with the busy crowd of students, and teachers in identical swim uniforms, she wouldn't notice Ember had gone. That was an extra two hours to make her escape. She'd left her bag stowed in her padlocked locker, and there was nothing in there to alarm anyone at first glance anyway: a change of clothes, a kit with her favourite paint brushes and tools, and, tucked deep inside an inner pocket, a cheap burner phone with her bus and plane tickets carefully loaded. Of course, if they looked any closer, they'd also find close to a thousand dollars in cash she'd saved from selling paintings and stealing from Bruno's pockets. Not enough, but enough.

The nervous excitement that had been bubbling inside her all day kept her alert and happy, even as she threw sinking weights for the kids to dive for, dragged gleeful littlies around by pool noodles, and gently corrected her adult swimmers who'd learned so many bad habits that they were harder to teach than the children. When the last lesson of the day was done, she slipped away, got dressed, and headed out the door. She took the back way out of the complex, leaving her car with the tracker parked out the front. Freedom, she decided, smelled like chlorine and hot asphalt.

She pulled her cap low over her eyes, and with her head down, made her way down the street. Twenty minutes until her bus left; she was cutting it fine. She sped up, got to the intersection, and looked both ways. There was a noise, a familiar throaty roar that made the hairs on her arms stand up, and then an old orange Mustang with the ding on its front fender nosed its way around the corner.

Bruno.