RONAN
She didn't stop at one.
The second slap landed before I'd fully recovered from the first, then a third, each one sharp and flat and deliberate, her palm connecting with my cheek over and over until the skin was hot and tingling and I had stopped flinching because there was no point.
I stood there and took it because she was my mother and because somewhere underneath the sting of it I understood that this was the version of I was so scared for you that she allowed herself.
Her name was Silver and she didn't cry. She never had, not once in my entire life, not even at my father's funeral. She hit instead. She always had.
"You stupid, ungrateful brat." Her voice was shaking, which was somehow worse than the slapping, her amber eyes blazing with everything she'd been holding for how
