Lily! Call the police! He’s got a knife.
This memory rings in my head, over 20 years later, as sharp and present and piercing as the morning alarm. “He” is my stepfather. Lily* is my 13-year-old big sister. My mother is out of view, behind the kitchen door. Lily hovers. I stand behind her, frozen, in my nightgown, with bare feet. I am nine years old.
No one called the police that day. Or the next day. Or the day after that. And over the next 20 years the police were called only a handful of times. But the domestic abuse – the physical, emotional, psychological abuse – was constant.
