I nearly exploded at that moment but instead I kept my cool and told my daughter that it was bedtime. She whined a little bit but eventually gave in.
So I took her upstairs, had her washed up and slipped into her pajamas. Then onto her bed. About 30 minutes later I came down and both of them were still eating in anger. I grabbed the tablecloth and dragged it. My action was followed with sauces spilling and shattering glass.
Becky was the first to recover and yell at me forgeting her fake persona for a moment.
"Have you f****** lost it, Daisy?!" Then it was like she remembered that her mask had slipped, she quickly put it back on her voice growing instantly and unnaturally softer.
"I–i mean…I see, it looks like I have overstayed my work from I'm sorry," she quickly got up and left avoiding the shards of glass in her steps. It looked like my husband wanted to approach her but hesitated, only glaring at me.
"You just don't know where to stop, do you, Daisy?!"
Here we were again, another heated fight. I had tried, really tried to avoid it but it had gotten up to my neck and my body had moved quicker than my mind could have anticipated it, and now in this adrenaline field moment I didn't regret it one bit.
"Why would you let that woman come close to Eliza?" I spat out angrily, "Have you forgotten what she did to me? Everything I told you about her?"
Whether or not she actually had plans to seduce my husband didn't change the fact that Becky had turned every weekend moment into an absolute nightmare for me growing up. And despite everything she had done she had never so much as offered even a half-hearted apology to me not in the past and not now, so there was no need for me to see her as family and definitely no need for Eliza too.
"She was the one that bought the dollhouse for Eliza," he said, silencing me for a moment or two then I snapped again, "so what? I'll toss it in the trash and buy my daughter a bigger and better dollhouse!"
He groaned heavily, "Daisy, when are you finally going to let go of the past? Are you going to hate your own sister forever just because she pulled a couple of childish pranks on you when she didn't know any better?"
The way he effortlessly defended her sealed my lips again, when I found my voice it was chipped and cracked.
"Childish pranks? Becky and her friends would scribble on my desk telling me to end myself, you call that childish?"
Once again he looked at me like I was the one with the problem, and not my two-faced b**** step sister.
"She has changed," Robert insisted stubbornly.
I laughed.
"How?" I asked, finally tossing away the tape clothes in my grip, "has she finally decided to spread her legs for you too?"
What came next, I couldn't have predicted. Stepping over the shards with nothing but flip flops my husband walked towards me and grabbed me by my collar shoving me against the wall.
"Shut up!" He spat out, I don't know if he was unaware of his own strength but I was slowly running out of air to breath my vision blacking out while I fought for some air. This continued for a while until he suddenly let me fall to the ground, my back sliding hotly against the wall.
At this point I was gasping for air, by the time I had to get into myself and was just taking small breaths he was gone. I went up to his bedroom to check and he wasn't there looking around the entire house until I got a text from him.
It read; "Sorry. I need some space,"
He came back three days later. I found him in the dining room which had been cleaned of all traces of that night incident apart from the nightmares that still woke me up from sleep.
Roberts didn't bring it up, didn't apologize. He didn't even explain where he had been for the past 3 days. That was just it. He had strangled me and that was it.
That should have been a wake up call for me, if nothing else was, but just as I was about to bring it up Eliza came running into the dining room yelling excitedly about pancakes and everything I wanted to say dissolved into the air.
I might not have a happy marriage, but she deserved a good father at least that was what I told as I replied to the memory of my own all about strangling me over and over again during breakfast.
So I ended up not cancelling the arrangements I had made for our anniversary, hoping that now we could put our past behind us. The night before I asked to sleep in Robert's room, he didn't complain, just stood awkwardly at the door before stepping away to head back to bed.
As he texted away deep into the night I just turned around and forced myself to sleep telling myself tomorrow would be better.
Exactly twenty three hours later, I saw a nude pictures of him and another woman flooding my phone followed by a text that read; "He's always mine, but you took him from me, I'm back to get what's mine and I will make you face pain for the number of years you took him from me."