The bedroom door slammed open with a sharp crack, like a warning that something long brewing in the dark had finally erupted.

Ethan didn’t see me as a person. To him, I was a problem. An inconvenience. Something to control.

“Get up, you useless cow!” he shouted, yanking the sheets away, reducing me to a word that hurt deeper than any blow.

I was six months pregnant, but my body didn’t feel like a place of life. It felt like a battlefield where fear and survival fought endlessly.

I tried to sit up, but the pain in my back and the weight in my belly made every movement feel impossible.

“It hurts… I can’t move fast,” I whispered, my voice trembling, hoping for even the smallest trace of compassion.

It never came.

He laughed. And that laugh was worse than anything, empty of empathy, full of cold contempt.

“Other women suffer and don’t complain,” he said, as if pain were a competition and I was failing on purpose.

I made my way downstairs, holding onto the wall. Every step was humiliation. Every breath, a struggle to stay upright for the life growing inside me.

But the kitchen was worse than the violence.

It was the acceptance of it.