The House of Falling Light

by R.J. Ellory

Genres: International Crime & Mystery; Crime Fiction; Suspense

Synopsis

The brand new thriller from the internationally bestselling author of A Quiet Belief in Angels

Fifteen year-old Eleanor Clewson's life of quiet rural drudgery collapses when her parents' marriage explodes into violence. Eleanor escapes across the Texas plains, where she crosses paths with a dangerous man on the run. As she flees through desolate towns and anonymous cities, Eleanor will do whatever it takes to survive - pursued throughout by Roy Haskell, a lone Texas Ranger, who is desperate to understand the truth behind her wild flight across the country.

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PRAISE FOR R.J. ELLORY

'Beautiful and haunting... A tour de force' MICHAEL CONNELLY

'Beautifully written novels that are also great mysteries' JAMES PATTERSON

'A uniquely gifted, passionate, and powerful writer' ALAN FURST

'In the top flight of crime writing' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

'The master of the genre' CLIVE CUSSLER

Release date: June 25, 2026

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 432

Sample

Sunrise broke over the horizon.

Through moth-eaten holes in a makeshift curtain, shifting now in the faint breeze, spots of light fell on the wall. Eleanor watched them as they danced back and forth. Dust motes joined the silent ballet. Out to her left and beyond the cracked window, she heard the plaintive yelp of a dog. A single, harsh syllable quietened it, but – a moment later – it started up again. A lonesome, mournful sound.

A door slammed somewhere in the double-wide. The eager drumroll of hurrying feet down the hallway. Not yet three and unable to reach the doorhandle, Eleanor’s brother, Buddy, called her name – ‘Lenna, Lenna, Lenna!’

Slipping from beneath the blanket, she opened the door for him. Barrelling into the room, arms wide, she scooped him up. Back beneath the blanket, at first a wriggling tornado of knees and elbows, Buddy then settled and snuggled against her.

‘Hungry,’ he said.

‘I know, darlin’,’ Eleanor replied. ‘We’ll wait till Ma and Pa have gone, see what we can find, eh?’

In no time at all, she heard the guttural choke of the pickup, the sound of the engine fading quickly.

Ma and Pa – Ernest and Renée Clewson, he a slaughterman, she a waitress – forever battling financial hardship, battling their own bad choices, battling one another. They had moved out here to West Texas – a landscape sculpted by wind and an endless caravan of hard wheels and hooves – back when Eleanor was not much older than Buddy. Ernest, forty-one but looking a decade older, was a pessimist and a hard drinker. He tore through bottles like a demon, a vain effort to quench some insatiable thirst. Swallowing glass after glass, he perhaps believed that the dull fog would vanquish today, yesterday, so many earlier days, and somehow deliver a better tomorrow. His mind, ever quick to jump to wrong conclusions, was all set to navigate a myriad roads to failure. Unable to grasp the possibility of success, he believed luck to be a commodity assigned only to others. Or perhaps, when his time had come, the only luck left in stock had been the bad kind.

Renée, thirty-eight and burdened by the weight of owning nothing, believed that the events of her life, from cradle to grave, were tied together by a single, dark thread. She was bound to it, and there would be no unravelling. Life was a twisted knot of hurt. If just one thing would come out true and fair. Better not to hope.

Into this collision of human frailties, Eleanor was born. Conceived on the back seat of a borrowed Bantam Coupe in April of 1935, she was delivered just a month after her parents married. She’d often wondered if she was the catalyst for their union, that without the pregnancy they would have taken separate roads.

Now fifteen, her youthful appearance belying how hardened and inured and resilient she was, Eleanor dreamt of places to which she would never travel, and dreamt with all the vigour and imagination of youth, as if to question such dreams would be to question her own existence. I dream therefore I am.

She had been a beautiful child, and her beauty had not been diminished by a hardscrabble upbringing. Her hair – fox-russet – paled beneath the sun and framed her features in mellow gold. The colour of her eyes seemed to change with the seasons. Her irises, Egyptian blue, would fade to azure as spring came to a close. Within the first weeks of fall, they would change again – a hint of green when she looked towards the light. Come winter, the colour washed from her complexion, she appeared more Irish than American South. Perhaps, generations back, there were ancestors from across the ocean. Such a thing would come as no surprise, for the entire nation was populated by European immigrants and their mongrel offspring. She bore the strongest resemblance to her mother, and for this she was grateful. Try as she might, she refused to believe that through her veins and arteries coursed the same blood as that of her father.

‘Let’s go,’ Eleanor said flinging back the blanket.

Buddy went at a run to the kitchenette.

A precarious cathedral of unwashed dishes in the sink; an empty box of Wheat Honeys on the table; scuffed and greasy linoleum; the ever-present smell of scorched butter and rancid cooking oil.

‘Hungry, Lenna.’

Eleanor hefted Buddy up onto the countertop. She searched the cupboards, found flour, a single egg.

‘Pancakes,’ she said.

Washing a pan as best she could with tepid water, she prepared something vaguely edible. A growing child needed more, a good deal more. Somewhere in the place she would find a few coins, enough to get him a hamburger in town.

Buddy wolfed the pancake, asked for more.

‘We’ll go get a burger,’ Eleanor told him.

Once dressed, she scoured the place for money. Her father, so often stumbling out of his clothes, dropped loose coins from his pockets. They were a couple of pennies and a dime under the bed, a quarter on the windowsill. In a vest pocket, she found a second quarter.

The walk into West Plains was a mile and change. Buddy would make it a couple of hundred yards, and then she’d have to carry him.

The hardening gloom of the sky, low enough to reach with outstretched hand, promised a rain that would never fall. Beneath her feet, the earth twisted and groaned with a thirst that would not be quenched. At least not today. The air hung heavy with dust; it scoured the eyes, blurred the vision.

On the flat horizon stood the skeletal frames of abandoned barns and grain stores, once filled to bursting with earth’s bounty, now nothing more than broken fingerprints. Whatever was harvested from Mother Nature, she would exact her dues. Always a price to pay. Beyond that, out towards Odessa and Midland, were the rust-ravaged drills and pumps of so many failed oilfield ventures. Men had given their blood, sweat and tears – even their lives – for the unrequited promise of black gold.

This country – this Texan desert – was a land of broken hearts and broken spirits.

Eleanor Clewson was wild for somewhere different, as if some new place would quell the rage inside her. Only with age and experience would she understand that whatever calm vista lay beyond was no remedy for the storm within. Her thoughts churning, foaming like the opposing currents of a river, threatened to drag her into the looming tide of self-doubt and darkness. It was a familiar pull, a nail in the orbit of a magnet. To resist it was to defy the laws of physics.

A frantic din of birds erupted into a mother-of-pearl sky like buckshot.

Buddy laughed, pointed. ‘Birds, Lenna!’

‘Birds,’ Eleanor echoed, and watched them as they swooped and billowed.

After that, the only sound was the wind, wearing away the land, dulling the angles of rocks.

To those in West Plains, families such as the Clewsons were part of some wretched rural outpost. A cluster of static trailers, like a rash on the landscape, housed those who had never dragged themselves out of the Great Depression. Grubby, shoeless children clothed in hand-me-downs and hopelessness, all of them raised up haphazard by parents who had no right to be. No routine, no structure. Do what you want. Don’t make no damned difference anyhow. Grew up knowing only one thing for sure – that they didn’t stand a chance.

The town itself was little more than a wide part in the road. A gas station, a church, a hotel straight out of a low-budget cowboy picture, two saloons, a hardware store, a grocery, a pharmacy, and right at the end a diner with a soda fountain which bore the unlikely name of The Majestic.

The owner and counterman – Ralphie Meadows – was as old as gasoline. Ruddy faced, his nose a cartographer’s draft of veins, he wore the appearance of someone who’d drunk himself warm through a host of bitter winters. He was a bootlegger, as was his father, his father before him, and even now he could sell you a half gallon of something-or-other for less than a bottle of branded rye.

Eleanor hitched Buddy onto her hip and entered the diner.

Meadows looked up and smiled.

‘Well, if it isn’t Miss Eleanor and Mr. Eugene,’ he said.

Eleanor smiled. No one but Ralphie Meadows called Buddy by his given name.

‘Hey, Mr. Meadows.’

‘Come on and take a seat up here,’ Meadows said.

Eleanor eased herself onto a barstool and sat Buddy on the counter.

Glancing to her left, an old man was staring at her disapprovingly. Nursing a coffee cup, he just kept on looking. His features were rugged and unfinished, as if cut from hard stone with a blunt chisel. Tiring, the sculptor’s attention had fallen elsewhere and left the detail undone.

Eleanor sensed the man’s disdain.

‘Good morning to you, sir,’ Eleanor said, but in such a way as it meant something else.

The old man sneered, showed a cluster of teeth the colour of fiddler’s rosin.

‘Be courteous or go home,’ Meadows said.

Turning to Eleanor with a smile, he added, ‘Pay Mr. Misery no mind, sweetheart. If he was just a mite smarter, he could write a book on bein’ stupid.’

Mr. Misery grunted dismissively, the expression on his face as if he’d just struck a low table with his shin.

‘So, what can we get for you fine people this mornin’?’ Meadows asked.

‘Just a hamburger for Buddy here, please,’ Eleanor replied.

‘And for you?’

‘I ain’t so hungry.’

Meadows stepped towards the kitchen hatch.

‘Doris! Hamburgers for two, all the trimmings!’

Doris’s face appeared in the aperture, her hair a lacquered mountain of cotton candy. If she leant too close to a flame, she would flare like a match head. The years had not been kind – years of drinking, smoking, disagreeing, resenting. Her complexion bore the texture of a battered suitcase, garish lipstick and eye-shadow like novelty decals that told the tale of her travels. She’d worked some years in a retirement place up in Pleasant Farms, had never lost the habit of speaking loud and slow.

‘Well, hey there you two,’ Doris said. ‘How come you ain’t in school, darlin’?’

Eleanor looked at Buddy. ‘Got a handful o’ trouble here to mind,’ she said.

‘You still readin’?’

‘All the time I can, Miss Doris.’

‘Well, you keep at it. We got just one life is all, but we read a book and we get to live a new one every time.’

‘Let’s get those sandwiches goin’ there, Doris,’ Meadows said. ‘Got hungry folk out here.’

Doris disappeared.

‘No, Mr. Meadows. Just the one. I ain’t got—’

Meadows leant towards Eleanor, closed his hand over hers. ‘You keep your money in your pocket, eh?’

‘I can’t take no charity—’

‘Charity is one thing, kindness is somethin’ else. Now, who wants a milkshake?’

Once they’d eaten and Meadows’s back was turned, Eleanor left what coins she had on the counter.

Walking back, Eleanor could feel the heft and heave of the wind, now flexing its muscles. A storm was coming, the kind that tore up three, four inches of good dirt and sent it a hundred miles to someplace no one lived and no one farmed. On its way, it would uproot trees and tear down fences, send shingles across state, strip paint from cars, stop signs, streetlights, gas pumps, as if on a mission to bleach the whole world of colour.

She did not belong here, this much Eleanor knew. Perhaps in some uncharted universe there was a world where equality of fortune was the natural order of things. Here there were those blessed and those cursed, and there appeared to be no sense to the division. A man could devote his life to the welfare of others and yet be eaten alive by cancer before his fifth decade. Another, a man of hatred and violence, could reap the benefit of others’ industry and die in peaceful sleep after a century. Like her father, her bastard, drunken father who’d spent his whole life looking for someone to blame.

Her mother was drowning. Of this Eleanor was certain. Tied by a chain to a deadweight that kept on falling. Seemed no matter what Renée said and no matter the way she said it, she could never predict her husband’s reaction. One time Renée had waited three days – three awful, nerve-shredding days – to tell him that they’d cut one of her shifts at work. She knew he would flare hot and fast, a rage of fury coming at her like a stampede. He’d merely grunted, never once looking up from the newspaper. A week later, she asked if he’d mind picking up milk en route from work. A whirlwind of fists left her stunned and breathless on the kitchen floor. It wasn’t his damned job to be fetching milk. Who did she think he was, the errand boy? And what the hell did she do all day anyway? He’d stood over her, braced like a bare-knuckle fighter, the smell of blood and fear from the slaughterhouses haunting the air like a ghost that would never leave, every word from his lips flavoured with whiskey. His soul was a twisted thing, gnarled and knotted like an arthritic hand. Somewhere a deep well of misery fuelled him, forever the innocent victim of self-made catastrophe. Even as he smiled his eyes warned of impending disaster.

Renée Clewson’s body language was a dictionary of worry and heartache and hunger, her husband’s one of bitterness and violence. If I must suffer, then you must suffer too.

The deterioration of their marriage – as if dragged downward by the force of gravity itself – had been inevitable. Sideways glances of disapproval gave way to brusque words, bitter slights, the escalating acrimony that culminated with outright declarations of war. Across the ranks of respective families, forces were marshalled. Mutual friends and acquaintances took sides, skirmishes and defensive retreats were strategized. It was a soap opera written by drunks, liars and the feeble of mind.

Eleanor watched it unfold, her heart a heavy stone, her eyes clouded with pain.

And then there was Buddy. Oblivious to detail perhaps, but no less disturbed by the raised voices, the scarcity of love, the absence of food, the sense that all was not as it should be, he nevertheless seemed to possess an indefatigable well of affection for his sister. Eleanor mothered him, that was the truth, not because Renée was incapable, but because Renée was broken and exhausted. Double shifts, sometimes a third back-to-back, and she would stumble in, drop where she stood, stay where she landed. What money she earned, she gave to her husband as if dues on some long-outstanding debt.

And Eleanor – her mind way out in front of everything, running into the unknown without chart or compass – tried so hard to understand how she’d arrived in such a place. Perhaps there was no explanation. The universe and all it contained was a crapshoot. You had the cards you were dealt, and that was that.

Eleanor Clewson seemed forever to have her mind on the future, her eye on the nearest exit. As yet, she had not spied it, but she knew that one day it would appear.

The weight of the past was unwieldy and burdensome, like the fallen priest dragging rocks across wild country as penance.

Renée Clewson, née Blanchard – her father’s side out of Louisiana – had wrenched herself from the ties of her history as if from barbed wire. The wounds would perhaps heal in time, but the scars would be eternal. These things were now embedded in the fingerprints of her soul.

The place of her birth, the history of her ancestors, did not pull at her. Such things drove her away. Some said home was the place you finally stopped running. If that were true, the thought alone left her breathless.

Renée’s father – Caius Blanchard – had been a tormented and troubled man, as if a multitude of personalities wrestled to gain a foothold beneath his skin. Skittish eyes, ever watchful, he believed the intent of others was always malign. He spoke tight-lipped and cautious, as if to open his mouth would be to attract some flying thing in to choke him. A sharp tongue; no more than a handful of words and he would draw blood. The last thing I want to do is hurt you, but I ain’t rulin’ it out. In truth, hurting was the first thing on his mind.

Renée knew her husband was much the same.

One time she’d read something in a book: You so often meet your destiny on the road you take to avoid it. She had thought about it long and hard. It was cold comfort, but in her mind it meant that there was really nothing she could have done to avert her destiny. Whichever road she’d taken, she would have wound up here. People lived the life they deserved, it seemed. Folks talked of luck, good or bad, but there wasn’t such a thing. Give a man the world – if he thought he didn’t deserve it, he’d go right ahead and smash it to pieces. That’s just how it was. Folks, no matter their beginnings, wound up with the life they believed was due them.

Her own life was a steep field of rocks, and here she was clambering through and out and over. It was a brutal terrain, no question, but there was no other path to the future. The tomorrows came too fast and they never stopped. Life – all of it – was a breathless rush of madness, and she sometimes wondered how long she could last. She knew, in truth, that she would keep on going until something – or someone – stopped her.

Renée worried for Eleanor, she worried for Buddy, she worried for her husband. She carried enough worry to open a store.

Most times, worked off her feet and down to the bone, she did not have time to think, but when she did her thoughts were fearful, the ghosts of some unknown future. If she were to wager, she would wager with certainty of loss. She would clench her fists and silently despair. Good things did not come to those who prayed, nor those who waited. Good things only came to those who deserved them, and if she believed both her father and her husband, then she deserved just about nothing at all.

Ernest Clewson had torn into her life full of passion and fury. She was twenty-three years old, knew little of love, even less of men. The passion he professed was for her, the fury for some other unknown betrayal, carrying it on his shoulders like a weapon of war. It was not long before she understood that his anger was to be shared with anyone in his orbit.

Now she believed there was no more love left inside of her. Whatever reserve she’d possessed she’d emptied out for Ernest, for Eleanor, for Buddy. She was hollow, a dry gourd, her heart possessing no more substance than a fairground balloon. There would be no recovery. What she’d believed she could create here – a life, a sense of order, a future – was not held in some bus depot Lost & Found awaiting only a ticket stub to reclaim it. It was gone. Gone forever.

People staggered through the years, at some point aware that the path they’d taken – for all its promise – would not deliver them to the place they’d hoped. Too late to turn back, too far along to begin anew, they devoted the remainder of their lives to the bland comfort of the familiar. Assuming a mien of sad nobility, they would speak of duty, obligation, familial responsibility, all the while concealing a deep resentment of reality. They had been misled. Their true path was elsewhere and it had been denied them.

There was a life out there. A different life. Her own life.

Renée looked around the squalid trailer. No matter what she did, it would not stay clean. No matter what she earned, there was never enough food. Her husband – liar, philanderer, gambler, a man who could not keep his word if you kept it for him – was no more at the slaughterhouse than he was home. She knew the woman’s name – Phyllis Whitney – a blousy, over-upholstered tramp, more than capable of swilling as much liquor as Ernest could fund. On her he spent money that should have fed the children. Eleanor was rake-thin, her ribs prominent, her arms like kindling. And Buddy, forever griping and fussing, forever hungry. It was not right. It had never been right. And Phyllis Whitney was not the first, would no doubt not be the last.

The unfolding present was inevitable. Just as future events were now being conceived – soundless, their dynamics unidentifiable – so the inception of current circumstances had been founded in some unknown past. Weeks, months, perhaps years before, wheels were set in motion by words or deeds that could not now be undone.

When Renée thought about what she would say, what she would do, her guts were a basket of snakes, her heart a clenched fist. Her hands fluttered anxiously, like birds hastening out of undergrowth, alert to the velvet footfall of a fox.

She had sent Eleanor and Buddy away with two dollars to a fairground in Saragosa. They were with neighbours, wouldn’t be back until dark. By that time, whatever was going to happen would have happened. There would be no undoing.

Ernest Clewson entered the trailer like a shadow. Slyness in everything about him, his demeanour as slippery as a shucked oyster.

It was past six. The bare, grease-layered bulb above the stove cast a wan and feeble light.

Renée could smell liquor, cheap perfume, the memory of sweaty, urgent sex.

‘How was work?’ she asked.

She could see it in his eyes, busy as anything weaving up a coat of lies and expecting her to wear it. No, she thought. Not this time. Never again.

‘Same old, same old,’ Ernest slurred.

Her thoughts a random fury – a swarm of wasps in a Mason jar – but she kept her tongue in her pocket.

‘What’s for supper?’ he asked.

‘Ain’t no supper here,’ she replied.

His face twisted, a bitter mask, as if geared up to spill some savage words.

‘You think I don’t know what’s goin’ on, then you must reckon me for every kind of stupid,’ she said.

‘Nothin’ goin’ on that’s any of your damned business,’ Ernest blurted. He took a step forward.

‘I figure the best thing you could do right now is head on back to Phyllis Whitney’s place, get her to make you some supper.’

Ernest feigned surprise.

‘We gonna do that, Ernest? We gonna dance around this thing like it ain’t true? I know you’re seein’ her, an’ I know you’re screwin’ her too. Best for everyone if you was chained up in a cellar.’

‘Sweetheart, I have no idea what you’re talkin’ about. I don’t know no one called Phyllis whatever—’

He carried the piteous expression of an abandoned dog awaiting its master.

Renée wanted to say something hurtful, each syllable a paper cut that would sting and bleed. He looked at her with such weakness that she knew the anger she felt would go unspoken. She could not find in herself the same cruelty he’d shown towards her.

‘I think of you and it just twists my heart something awful,’ she said. ‘You won’t ever step in and take up the reins. As a husband an’ a father, you’re about as much use as a magazine horoscope.’

She had never spoken like this. Forever apologizing, on the back foot, cautious of igniting the furnace of his temper, now it seemed that whatever chains she’d been dragging for the past decade and a half were loosening. The end of her tether had been reached a long time back. What kept her trapped was her unwillingness to admit she’d been wrong about him. More than that, her unwillingness to admit defeat. Now she felt something else. A need to tell the unvarnished truth. It was a rare and true emotion, as profound as it was unfamiliar. She knew not its origin, save that it served to revive some aspect of her self-assurance. Of course, it would not last – for no good thing endured – but while it remained she felt sure enough of her footsteps to walk alone and unaided.

Ernest knew then that something was different. For the first time in all the years they’d been together, she was speaking her mind. He sensed disturbance in the air, like voices whispering in the dark – conspiratorial and menacing.

‘And who’s put you up to this?’ he snapped. ‘You got yourself some fancy man promisin’ you all manner of things if you take off with him? Is that what’s goin’ on here?’

‘Oh, we ain’t all like you, Ernest. Some of us make a vow before God and do our damnedest to keep it. I been faithful to you the whole time, which is more than can be said of you.’

‘And where do you think you’re gonna go, eh?’

Renée laughed coldly. Her fury was a tight fist in her chest. ‘It ain’t me that’s goin’ nowhere,’ she said. ‘You collect up whatever you can carry an’ get yourself someplace else. I’ll send on the rest of your things when you get there.’

Ernest nodded slowly, as if weighing up the words, the situation itself.

‘You ain’t never wanted me happy,’ he said. ‘You done worked as hard as you can to make my life a misery, you know that?’

‘You go on an’ tell yourself whatever makes you feel better,’ Renée replied.

‘Well, sweetheart, just about the only thing that’d make me feel better right now is if you get off your lazy ass and make me some goddamned supper.’

Renée didn’t move.

‘You hear what I said?’ Ernest threatened, his voice hard as a hammer.

Renée just looked at him, her gaze direct, searching, as if she’d known this face from some other life and yet struggled to place it. In that moment, he seemed a stranger to her, and that’s the way she wished it to remain.

Ernest was caught between self-preservation and rage. He knew what he had, and he had it good. Where else would he find a woman to cook, to clean, to take care of his kids, all the while oblivious to his personal business? But she wasn’t oblivious. She knew about Phyllis Whitney, perhaps others without names, and the precarious balance between security and freedom was being rocked to its foundations.

‘I’m gonna say this one time an’ one time only,’ he started.

‘If it’s anythin’ but “Goodbye”, I ain’t gonna hear it, Ernest.’

The simmer boiled. The swell of rage came fast – like a spring held in check and suddenly released. Two steps, three, and he was standing over her.

Renée started to get up from the chair, but he was too close, too strong. He pushed her suddenly, and she sat down with sufficient force to send the chair over backwards. Arms flailing, grasping air, she felt her head connect with the floor. For just a moment, she was stunned, breathless, and Ernest took the opportunity to fling the chair aside and kneel astride her.

Grabbing her hair and twisting it, he pulled her head up until their faces were no more than six inches apart. When he spoke, his voice was low, menacing, filled with vicious intent. Spittle flew from his lips.

‘You are my goddamned wife,’ he said. He emphasized each syllable with a tug on her hair. Pain shot through her scalp. ‘You are here to look after me, to clean for me, to make my goddamned supper. What about this don’t you fucking understand? It ain’t so difficult. What’s wrong with you, huh? You gone slack in the head, have you? Is that’s what’s happened here?’

Looking up at him, Renée knew there was no way out save acquiescence.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

‘What’s that, sweetheart? I didn’t quite hear you.’

‘I’m sorry, okay? I don’t know what I was thinkin’.’

Ernest frowned. He looked askance at her, suspicion in his eyes. Perhaps he couldn’t believe that she’d surrendered so easily.

‘You’re sorry?’ he asked.

‘I am so sorry. I guess I’m just exhausted, worried about money, all these things. Sometimes I just have no idea what I’m thinkin’ or sayin’.’

Renée felt Ernest’s grip loosen on her hair. He knelt back, alleviated some of the weight across her midriff.

‘Well, that’s okay,’ he said. ‘I can understand you gettin’ a little worn-out every once in a while. But man, this is crossin’ the line. You do see that, don’t you? The things you said, the way you talk back to me. Well, that’s just not somethin’ that we can ever hear again, is it?’

Shaking her head, her eyes filled with tears, she said, ‘No, an’ I’m sorry. I really am so very sorry.’

‘So, if I let you up now, what you gonna do?’

‘Gonna fix you some supper. That’s what I’m gonna do. Right now. Fix you a real nice supper an’ get you a drink an’ whatever else you need.’

Ernest smiled. The victor. He took a deep breath, exhaled slowly.

‘Hell, Renée, you sure don’t make it easy for a man to be your husband.’

Moving sideways, he then rose to his feet. He brushed down the knees of his pants, hitched his belt, set the chair straight and sat down. As a magnanimous gesture, he extended his hand and helped Renée up off the floor.

Renée – now cowed and servile – went to the sink. She fussed with the dirty plates, filled the kettle and lit the stove.

Ernest rolled himself a cigarette and watched her in silence.

‘I think there’s a pork chop,’ Renée said. ‘I can make up some creamed potatoes, some gravy, maybe a biscuit or two.’

‘Sounds just fine,’ Ernest said. He looked around for the ashtray, and – failing to see it – he flicked his ash onto the linoleum.

The kettle boiled. Renée washed the dishes. She took a frying pan down and set it on the stove.

Ernest finished smoking, stood up to flick the butt out of the window. He nodded approvingly as Renée took the pork chop from the icebox.

‘Fetch me out a beer while you’re there, sweetheart,’ he said.

Renée reached in for the beer, turned and took a step towards her husband.

Instinct, self-preservation, perhaps something as base as hatred, kicked in. Without thought for consequence, Renée knew – in that split second – that she’d reached a point of no return. It was