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You could fill it up with plush bedding and fancy breakfast options.
But you could never stop it from being a cage.
Right until that moment, the little girl had always known something wasn't right about her home.
Her parents fought all the time.
One night, her brother had to hold her in his strong arms while she sat on the staircase, watching her father punch her mother's face until it turned black and blue.
On another night, she saw her mother attack her father with the blunt end of a knife. Maybe she hadn't wanted to kill him. Maybe it was to just drive the point home.
And whatever her father did to her mother, she did to her children.
Emma, however, was no meek lamb. At twelve, when her mother tried to hit her with a clothes hanger for the thousandth time, she put out her hand and grabbed the edge.
She was already an inch taller than her four-foot-something mother.
Emma looked at the devil, or so she thought. She wanted to feel love. But all she found in her heart was hate and rage. And she spewed venom that day.
"Touch me again, and I'll kill you."
Maybe her mother saw her tormentor in Emma's brown eyes. She stopped hitting her. Instead, whenever she got mad, she made Emma watch.
Watch as she slapped her face with slippers or scratched her own skin.
Watch as she told her that she was forced to harm herself. The reason? Because she couldn't hit Emma.
Someone had to take the punishment. So her mother damaged herself.
In the story Emma wrote, the girl eventually overcame the hill and escaped the pretty mansion of horrors.
She left the sunsets and the picnic spots and ran away to a city where chaos was the norm.
For Emma, the day of her grand escape coincided with her mother finding out she had applied to a university in NYC and locking her up in her room.
She even got a doctor's certificate that labeled her daughter as "unstable and in need of parental supervision."
By this time, her father had already left. Maybe he'd drowned in his last drink, golden whiskey still churning in the pit of his lifeless stomach.
Or maybe he'd found a new home to destroy. The possibilities were endless.
So, Emma sat in her room, four days from when she was supposed to start classes. And she contemplated what she'd do when she escaped.
Because in every fairy tale, the heroine got a chance to run. And she knew she would too.
Prince Charming didn't come for her. But she didn't need him, because she had her brother. He returned from college and made a rope of bedsheets.
He climbed up and helped her down from the bedroom to the garden, past the driveway, and into freedom.
But freedom always came with a price.
For Emma Moore, the price had a name and a title.
“Emma joinedEast Harbor as a psychology student. Her brother referred the place to her. He knew that the best psychologists in town regarded the place as definitive, so it felt like a natural option.”
“Who was the brother?”
“Benjamin Moore.”
