Chapter Text
Cambridge, England - 1986
Her parents had said they wouldn’t be home until after midnight. It should have been safe for Saul to stay after the movie was over. Little did Farah know that at 10:30, the door to her bedroom would slam open and a pair of large hands would pull Saul off of her and throw him to the floor. Profanities were thrown, but not as hard as the blows that her father delivered with a baseball bat to his face, his chest, his abdomen-and Farah screamed.
As she had done once before trying to protect her mother, she leapt onto her father’s back. “Get off him!” She cried, beating on his shoulders. “Dad, stop!” And as he had done once before, her father paused long enough to throw her off of him before he continued with the brutal beating. Unlike before, her mother was there to catch her so she didn’t hit her head.
Farah was sobbing as her mother wrapped her arms around her shoulders and firmly guided her away. “I called an ambulance,” she whispered in her ear as they walked down the hall, but she could only manage a weak nod, too upset to speak.
Soon enough, the ambulance did indeed arrive-and with it the coppers. The latter questioned her father as the paramedics wheeled a thoroughly bloodied and unconscious Saul outside. Farah’s sobbing had stopped by then, but she still had silent tears streaming down her face as she watched from the living room window. She wrapped her arms around her slim frame, as if trying to protect herself-not from her father, but from the guilt she felt over ever inviting Saul into the house that first day. The guilt she felt for falling in love with him.
This is all your fault, a little voice in her head whispered. ‘The road to hell was paved with good intentions,’ Farah had read once, and wasn’t that the case here? She turned away from the window to watch the police shake her father’s hand and walk away. Andrew Dowling, the esteemed Dean of Cambridge, would suffer no consequences for what he had done that night, or any night. To Saul, to his own wife, and to his daughter. Farah may not have ever been the object of his ire, but the emotional damage watching the people she loved being harmed could not be properly explained.
She was glaring at her father when he happened to look back at her. He showed no shame, his expression cold, as he turned on his heel and went back up the stairs to get ready for bed. In that moment, Farah ground her teeth and silently swore to God and anyone else who would bloody listen that she would never marry a man like him.
Never.