Showing results for "Laura Mansfield" in Women's Fiction

The porch swing spoke to Alice. Come sit and rock and read and relax. Watch the waves. Let the sounds of the sea hypnotize you and lull you into contentment, it whispered. Could it really be that simple? Alice wondered. Alice had led an eventful, if not an extraordinary, life. She was recovering from a disastrous second marriage, had been shaken to her core, had caved in on herself and crawled back out again. She had raised a son and watched him fly from the nest.

Mike Pazzo was my husband. He was also a narcissist. Every conversation with Mike was a fight. I couldn’t hold my own, much less win those fights. He beat me down with his barrage of caustic words and his superior argumentative techniques. And he loved it. Sometimes I’d fall at his feet, prostrate in absolute abject defeat just to get him to stop yelling at me. I’m not even sure whether I was being sarcastic or authentic in my show of submission. In those moments, he would ball up his fists in silent fury - and walk away. That is when I began to wonder when he would hit me.