One year later.
“I gave you everything! I gave up everything- for you!” She cried out, pleading him to stay. But she wasn’t really pleading him. He didn’t know this of course, but it made no difference all the same. “How can you do this to-” She looked up at him, face shining, face soaking, and hushed her sobbing all at once. That’s when he walked out.
Their daughter Sophie was watching from her the crack under her bedroom door. Sophie would slide out of her bed slowly into her cushy mouse slippers and scamper soundlessly over to the door. Her tiny blue mermaid lamp gave just enough light to provide a good show of her parents feet. She did this every time they fought and on the nights before Christmas, to Sophie the yelling and crying were just part of the ballet she saw from between the floor and the door. Sophie loved ballet- almost as much as her daddy.
When the door slammed Sophie jumped up and ran out of her bedroom. “Daaaadddy!!” she shrieked and ran towards where he once stood. The mother stopped Sophie, scooped her up and shh-ed her saying “Quiet baby, everything’s gonna be okay now.”
*
“‘Everything’s gonna be okay now!’ That’s what she said! I wanted to say ‘what’s gonna be okay mom?! when we got no money? when daddy never comes back and it’s your fault? or is it gonna be okay when you start to hit me as i grow up lookin’ more like him than you?!”
“Sophie, I thought you said your stepFather would hit you?”
“Sure. I mean, they both did. Wait, are you here to listen to me and take notes or ask me questions?”
“I’m just here for you, Sophie. Whatever you need.”
Daddy… Sophie whispered and picked up the stuffed bear she had been talking to from the sofa. She walked calmy, dry and not-crying to her small blue garbage bin she painted a mermaid on and threw her therapist in- with all the others.
*
“Sophie!! Where’s dinner?!” her mother cried.
a poorly written essay on operant conditioning 
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