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“You said you’d never leave.”
William Reid turns from where he’d been halfway out of the door, suitcase in one hand and briefcase in the other, and finds his son tucked into the corner between the doorframe and the corner of the wall, staring at him with his bottom lip pulled between his teeth and his eyes brimming with tears behind the thick fishbowl glasses he wears.
“Spencer, go to your room,” William sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose as though even looking at the young boy causes him physical pain, and Spencer’s lip trembles when he stops biting on it with his teeth.
“But mom-” he starts, only to have his father point a finger harshly in his direction.
“No, Spencer, don’t bring your mother into this. Go to your room,” he says, gesturing up the stairs with his finger and the little boy shuffles out of the nook he’d been half hidden in to do as he’s told, climbing the stairs on his hands and knees in one last ditch attempt to get his father to realise just what he was walking out on; just what leaving his wife and his five-year-old son behind actually meant.
He hears the door slam before he’s even made it to the top of the staircase.
***
William Reid returns home three days later to what looks on the outside like the same house he left, but on the inside tells a very different story.
He finds his wife in her bed, asleep with the covers pulled up to her chin and her arms laid out carefully on top of the duvet, looking almost angelic if not for the dark rings around her closed eyes and the rows of cartoon themed band-aids stuck down haphazardly across her left forearm, only half covered by the sleeves of her nightdress.
Quietly making his way through the rest house, he finds all the picture frames in the living room have been smashed, which he assumes is why Diana needed the band-aids in the first place.
The only picture left standing in it’s frame is the one of Spencer on his first birthday, smiling towards the camera with his pale hair and cherub like features, and William pauses to pick up the photo, holding it in his hands for a moment before he sets it back down in it’s rightful place and moves on.
There’s a black bag that’s been tied up and pushed behind the couch, and as he picks it up he hears the sound of broken glass crunching together within.
On the dining table he finds all of the broken picture frames, the photos from within in a neat little pile off to one side, well away from the glue stick that someone, he assumes Spencer, has been attempting to put the frames back together with.
He doesn’t want to call out in case it wakes Diana, so he leaves the dining room and begins heading back upstairs, thinking that maybe his son had been in the bathroom, and he’d missed him when he’d checked his room.
It turns out he doesn’t even need to go that far.
Underneath the stairs, where the vacuum cleaner and spare shoes live, crouched into the very back corner sits Spencer; his knees pulled up to his chest with his head resting on top of them, his arms wrapped around his legs.
“Spencer?” William says, bending down until he’s kneeling on the floor a couple of feet away from his son, because there’s no way he’s going to get into the space Spencer is without crawling on his stomach. “What are you doing under there?”
The little boy seems not to notice at first, and when he finally does, lifting his head to look at him, William’s shocked to see silent tears running down his face. He’s just about to ask what’s wrong, when he notices something else.
There’s a purple and black bruise on his left cheek, running from just below his eye down to his jaw, and another that he can see on his son’s right shin.
“Spencer… what happened?” he asks, swallowing down the nausea he feels as a cold sweat breaks out on the back of his neck.
Spencer barely meets his eyes, instead pulling at a threat on the hem of his sweater.
“It’s not her fault,” he whispers eventually, so quietly that if William wasn’t within two feet of him he’d have no chance of hearing it at all.
“Spencer…” William begins, but he doesn’t know where he’s going with it, and when the little boy looks up and meets his eyes, anything he might have been going to say is lost.
“You said you’d never leave.”