Tw: Domestic Violence
She was eight years old again.
The dining room of the Muller family home was large the way houses in dreams were sometimes large, the ceiling higher than it should have been, the walls further apart, every sound carrying and bouncing back differently than it did in real life. The overhead light was too bright and the shadows underneath everything were too dark, and somewhere between those two extremes, little Yu Wuxian sat at the edge of the dining chair, her feet not quite reaching the floor, and listened to her world come apart.
It had started before dinner. It had been starting before dinner for weeks, the slow accumulation of silences and closed doors and her mother's eyes that were always slightly red at the edges now, and her father's jaw that was always slightly tight, and the way they stopped talking when she came into the room, which meant they were talking about something that she was not supposed to hear.
