It starts the same way it always does.

The low hum of the television cutting out. A slammed door. A muffled curse.

You don’t flinch anymore. You just pull the covers over your head, pressing your face into the pillow. If you press hard enough, maybe it will block out the sound.

It won’t. It never does.

Their voices rise and fall in waves, too familiar now to startle you. Your mother’s sharp, edged with exhaustion. Your father’s, lower, slower, measured in a way that only makes her angrier and fuels his fire.

Something about money. Something about drinking.

A muffled decry from your father followed by words so clear, so sudden, they stick with you forever.

“So do it!” your mother shouts.

The words snap like a branch underfoot, and for a second, there is silence. A pause too sharp to mean anything good.

Then something shatters. A glass. A plate. A piece of something that used to be whole.

You squeeze your eyes shut. Retreat. Try to disappear into the warm dark of your blankets, where the world is smaller, quieter.

It’s only when you hear your mother’s footsteps—heavy, purposeful—that you push the covers back. You sit up, heart thudding, watching the doorway.

She storms past, coat in hand, keys jingling. The front door slams, and the house shudders with the weight of it.

Your father stops in the opening to your room and you can smell that old familiar smell creeping under your blankets and burning your nostrils.

You stay frozen in place until he leaves. The night presses against the window, the house suddenly too big, too empty. Your father is standing in the kitchen. You can hear his breathing, rough, uneven, over the hum of the refrigerator opening and closing. The clatter of a bottle cap tumbling onto the counter.

I know how this ends. I know before it happens.

She will come back. She always comes back.

She will return, and the fight will become something small, something manageable. He will say something half-apologetic. She will pretend to believe it. The cracks will be hidden under routine, beneath the quiet understanding that neither of them is going to leave.

And you—you will wake up tomorrow, sit at the breakfast table, and pretend not to notice the way they look past each other.

It is a cycle. I have seen it before.

Because I think—I think I used to be part of one.

I do not know where the thought comes from, only that it blooms in me like something aching, something old.

Something I had forgotten.

I watch as your mother’s car pulls back into the driveway an hour later. As your father stands when she enters. As they speak in low, tired voices that do not match the ones from before.

And I watch as you stay curled beneath your blankets, already knowing that this isn’t the last time.