New to Mercy? Start here with the first chapter
Previous Chapter: Broken Things
There was a time when Isla would have dismissed Dave as a starry-eyed romantic. And perhaps she still saw him as a starry-eyed romantic, but having seen his strength with Lacey, his loyalty, the way he carried hurts that should have destroyed him, that should have destroyed their love, and somehow exchanged those hurts for hope and even, at times, flashes of joy . . . she couldn’t quite dismiss his words. She didn’t know if she could use them for anything, but she couldn’t quite dismiss them.
She had waited awhile, building her courage and letting the dust of change settle yet again. But one morning she woke up knowing it was time. “Come to the studio anytime,” Dave had told her. “Danny wants to talk when you’re ready.” Until now she hadn’t even been able to bring herself to text Danny, and how were they going to talk if she couldn’t even do that? So awkwardly, at first light, she had picked up her phone.
<<I’m sorry it’s so early, but can I come over before I lose my nerve?>> She had waited an agonizing half hour for his response.
<<Sorry, I was asleep. You can come over.>> And that was that. She was committed now.
The rusty brown door of Dave’s studio rattled when Isla opened it and it continued complaining until it had swung shut behind her. She stood shivering a little bit; it wasn’t exactly cold, but the huge room made her feel small and vulnerable. Not unhappy, though, not unsafe, just aware that she wasn’t in charge.
Morning was coming, lemon light and bright through the windows on the dawn side of the building. One pane was broken, and although Dave knew the kid who did it, he wouldn’t call the police on him. When Isla asked if he thought guilt would overwhelm the kid and he’d fix it voluntarily, Dave said he doubted it. When she asked if Dave’s insurance would cover the cost, he’d said he doubted that, too. When she asked if his current income would cover it, he’d smiled and tacked an old flannel shirt in front of it. “This will cover it.”
“Good luck come winter,” she’d said, and then, “Don’t you believe in justice?”
“Sure. But is justice giving a kid a police record just for doing what he’s done 100 times when it didn’t bother anyone?” Isla had shrugged.
The room wasn’t beautiful. The floor was covered with an irregular pattern of holes and scars where giant looms and other machines had been bolted or dragged or . . . well, who knew the stories of all those scars? The walls were unadorned, utilitarian. Dave’s desk was a patched- together ogre in the corner, a well-kept ogre, but a heap nonetheless. The only color was a row of rolled yoga mats that stood neatly on end against one wall. Isla plugged in the fairy lights. Her eyes said the space wasn’t beautiful, but her soul said it was, perhaps because of the quiet or the morning light, or the clear, wide-open expanse, or the handful of clients that came here for an hour of calm once a week. Perhaps because of what she had come here to do. It shared something with the cathedrals she had visited and, since it wasn’t ornamentation, it must have been the way a huge enclosed space stood in for the universe, for infinity, reminded one of the incomprehensible.
Isla looked at the plywood box of the changing room. He was in there, she supposed. She stared for a few moments, working up the nerve to enter.
The room was 12’ x 8’ and 8’ tall because Dave had used exactly 10 sheets of plywood. Instead of a door, he’d just left out one piece of plywood in the long side facing the room. He had originally hung a curtain of doubled-over unbleached muslin across it for privacy, but Lacey had replaced it with a chintzy Goodwill special of red flowers and green leaves against a lavender background. She never even took out the yellow “half-price on Tuesday” barb.
“Did you rob my great-grandmother?” Isla had scoffed to herself when she saw it the first time. Lacey had just said that she wanted something pretty and added something stupid about a woman’s touch. Something stupid, Isla thought now, why was I so mean, even if I only thought it? Why couldn’t I just let her be happy? Happiness now seemed too rare a thing to trifle with.
Isla took a deep breath for courage and then crossed the hushed sanctuary of the factory floor to Danny’s quiet refuge. The curtain had been replaced with a French door since the last time she’d seen it. She recognized it as one that Danny had bought for the rental house and wondered how or when he had fetched it from their basement. It was incongruous from the outside, against the plain plywood, but she knew it would be perfect from the inside, and it made the structure more stable.
Isla took off her black ballet flats and left them outside as she opened the door almost soundlessly. She sat cross-legged in the corner across from the mirror, which reflected her only darkly in the dim light that fell through the frosted glass of the door. She stretched herself forward instinctively; maybe Dave had taught her a thing or two about being flexible.
Danny’s back was to her. He’d fallen back asleep. A rough wool army blanket fell away from his slightly hunched shoulders and his strong back.
She sat silently in the corner for a long time, waiting, watching, aware of his vulnerability and sad that she was aware of it. She imagined him waking, him turning to her with a smile and, after everything, saying something flippant like, “What? You didn’t bring coffee?” But she knew he wouldn’t. It had been a long, long time or rather, the distance between them was a long, long space.
Eventually, her mind wandered. She stared at her reflection in the strange, dim mirror, more aware of it as the day grew brighter. Her thin black zip-up hoodie, her black yoga pants and her gray t-shirt were still almost invisible, but she could see her face and her bare feet. The antique glass, with its permanent black spots and speckles, had the peculiar quality of making you look, in addition to yourself as you really were, like a person important to history and preserved for the ages. In the past, Isla had liked to make faces in it to dispel that aura. Now she just thought how normal she looked. How very average. Not like someone whose superpower was anger, who had dragged a grown man across the floor to a hot stove. She moved a bit, restless, without realizing it.
“Unh. . . I guess I fell asleep again. Sorry.” Danny sat up and pulled the blanket around his shoulders, shyly, as if they were not a married couple. The tension that had always animated his movements was gone, though, Isla thought, not entirely in a good way. She realized too late that his tension had been hope, in a way, the visible sign of believing that if he could get everything right and hold himself and the world together, things would go well and dreams would be possible. It hadn’t worked. He didn’t seem depressed or despondent, but he did seem passive, waiting without expectation.
She drew a long breath as a way to delay. Yet here she was—she couldn’t think of a way out of this.
“I truly, truly thought that you deserved anything I could do to you,” she began. “I was never going to say I was sorry, because . . . well, we’ll get to that, I suppose. But the first thing has to be that I am sorry. Nothing that could have happened, nothing that you did, made the way that I treated you right. I thought it was justice, but it was only anger. I was wrong to treat you that way. And,” she saw her face in the mirror, her lips speaking the terrible, ugly words as her voice sank to almost a whisper, “I enjoyed it. It makes me sick to say it, but I enjoyed the drama of it and I loved feeling like I still had control of something. The crazier things got, the more I wanted that feeling of control. But it was hideously, gruesomely wrong. I am sorry. I know it’s absurd and that five words can’t fix everything, but know that I mean them: will you please forgive me? I have wronged you terribly.”
Danny groaned, “Isla, don’t.”
“No, I mean it. Please forgive me. There’s no other way out.” He started to speak and she said, “Wait. I need to say the words. I hit you. I burned you. I tried to hurt you in every way I could. That is what I am asking forgiveness for. And I tried to control you. Please forgive me.” She bowed her head, waiting.
“Isla, I was bad to you. I was rough with you and I was mean to you. I was stupid and thoughtless and impulsive and stubborn. I’ve had nothing to do but think about it. I was like a kid; I couldn’t see beyond what I wanted, beyond my little house of cards. I’m ready to be an adult. Imagine that—38 years old and ready to be a man.”
“Me too.” Isla had been tearing up, but they both laughed then, briefly, “I’m ready to be an adult, I mean.”
Danny went on, “I was always sorry, you know. Every time I did some stupid thing, yelling at you for losing a sock or for humming in the morning or for serving me peas or whatever. I was angry at myself almost right away for not treating you right when I loved you so much, but that anger at myself just made me more blind and stressed and impatient, and I ended up hurting you more. It’s not an excuse; it was inexcusable. But it’s the truth. I know that now. It’s me that needs your forgiveness.”
She wanted to sit next to him, lay her head on his shoulder, lock their fingers together. But she couldn’t. The wall between them would have to be brought down brick by brick. Yet, she could see over it now, finally, on tiptoe.
“I forgive you,” she said, “but now you have to forgive me. It’s not fair if you don’t. . .no. No, I’m sorry. Those are controlling words. It’s entirely up to you whether you forgive me. . .but I hope you will.”
“I forgive you.”
“I’m sorry for not seeing your hurt,” she said, “about the garage and the house, I mean. About your dreams. All I could see was your stubbornness. That should be something I love about you; it is something I love about you, I suppose. But it made things hard, and out of my control, and I didn’t like it. I didn’t have your back. I didn’t try to help you heal. I’m sorry.”
Danny had tears on his face. “I should have respected your concerns more, Isla. I didn’t know what I was doing, but it’s no excuse. I should have given you a fair hearing.” Isla nodded in acknowledgment.
They didn’t know what to do next or what came next.
Danny broke the silence. “Now what? Can we go back home, Isla?” His hope broke her heart.
“Danny . . . I went to a therapist. Kim saw some burns and bruises and got the wrong idea. She thought you were hurting me—there’s another apology I need to make. Anyway, she made me an appointment. I heard some things there that upset me, but one thing . . . well, there was a woman whose boyfriend was so awful to her, all the time, and then he’d say, ‘I’m sorry, sorry, sorry.’ Everyone there seemed to think that was just another way to control her. And it probably was.” She bit her lip. “They say it’s common. I believe it. I’m not sure that’s it’s conscious manipulation—probably sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t—but that doesn’t invalidate the control angle. I want to make sure I’m not doing that. Some people say there’s no healing for relationships that are broken like ours; some say the only hope is for the abuser to truly admit to the problem and Danny . . . I do truly admit to it. And you’ve admitted to things, too. But the thing is . . .whatever other people mean when they say they’re sorry, I meant it every time I ever said I was sorry. Every time. I was always going to never do it again. And even if it was a way to feel like I was in control of the situation, there was sadness and desperation in it, too. I never wanted to lose you. I was always scared. Even though I know I would never do it again now . . . I knew that every other time, too.” Isla slumped, defeated, against the wall. “And I still kept doing it. So I know that I can’t know. I’m not sure how I could ever be sure.”
“What then? Is this good-bye?” His heart was in his eyes and it broke Isla’s.
“I don’t know. How can I know, when every source I consult says that either there’s no way forward for us or we aren’t the kind of case they’ve studied? The partners of the women at the therapist’s office were . . . I saw and heard scary things there, and I want to believe that’s not me, not us. But the anger, Danny, the fear of loss and the need to be in control, and . . . well, again, the anger. It’s too much the same.” She shook her head. “I know the problems and the warning signs. I am truly sorry because I’ve wronged you and not just because I want to control you. That’s good, and maybe unusual, and hopeful. But I’m scared that anger will possess me again, because there have been moments throughout my whole life when it has taken me over. Not just with you. I don’t know how to be sure it won’t.”
“Do you love me, Isla? I love you.” His bearded face drooped.
“Danny,” she said, putting her hand on his, “I am just beginning to learn how to love you.”
“Can we start over? Really listen to each other, really look out for each other?”
“I think so. But only as new people. Only with time and hard work. This conversation is just the first step in forgiveness, let alone healing. Only because we’ve changed and truly admitted our wrongs. Only taking it slow. Only with some space.”
“Space. You mean you won’t be coming home.” His shoulders sagged again.
“Let’s sell the house, Danny. Let’s start over. Find somewhere where you can really open the garage back up, legally. I can help you, you know. Only if you want me to.”
“It will be a house you’ll like. And I won’t decide without you.”
“I can’t promise anything. I may not ever live there. I want to, Danny, I really do. I’m sorry, but I’ve given up thinking that I can force things to be the way I want them to be.”
“Just for me then; find something you like. So it’s there if we’re ever ready.”
“Yes. Ok.” She squeezed his hand.
They sat quietly for a while, until Danny said, “This sounds stupid at a time like this, but I’m starving. Mind if I go see what Dave and Lacey left lying around?”
Isla smiled reassuringly, remembering past episodes of hunger-fueled distraction. “Sure. Go.”
After several minutes, he was back with a bag of hot dog rolls and juice boxes. “Better than nothing?” He took out a roll, and tore it in half with his teeth.
Isla smiled and reached out her hand for a juice box and they sat side by side watching themselves in the mirror, not quite ready to be face to face.
Next Chapter: If the Dark Always Wins
Copyright 2025 Jennie Robertson