“I’m not joking.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“I am.”
Part of me still believed he wouldn’t actually do it.
I was wrong.
The first time it happened, the alarm started blaring while I still had soap on my arm and shampoo in my hair.
A second later, the water stopped completely.
The pipes groaned inside the walls.
“Time’s up!” Gerald shouted through the door.
I stood there in shock before wrapping myself in a towel, filling a plastic pitcher from the sink, and rinsing my hair with freezing water while my daughter cried in the other room.
When I confronted him afterward, he barely looked away from his laptop.
“See?” he said. “You managed.”
The second time was even worse because I knew it was coming.
I rushed through the shower, skipped shaving, barely washed properly, and watched the timer count down with anxiety twisting inside my chest.
The moment the alarm sounded, the water vanished again.
I crouched beside the tub afterward, rinsing shampoo from my hair with a bucket while Gerald walked past and said:
“You need to learn better time management.”
What scared me most wasn’t his cruelty.
It was the fact that I was starting to adapt to it.
