He said sorry the way other men say I love you.
Softly, with his whole face, looking at her the way he looked at her on their first date, as though she was the only person in the room.
And she believed him.
Every time.
Because the sorry was so complete that it erased the thing it was sorry for, the way a wave erases a footprint, as though it had never been there.
The first time, she told herself it was the stress.
He’d been retrenched two months earlier and the flat felt smaller when he was home all day.
She came back from work on a Tuesday and he was on the couch and she said something about the dishes and his hand moved before his mouth did.
It lasted two seconds.
Maybe less.
A slap, open palm, across her cheek.
Not hard enough to leave a mark. Hard enough to leave a silence that filled the kitchen for the rest of the night.
He didn’t apologise immediately.
He went to the bedroom.
She stood at the sink and washed the dishes he hadn’t washed and her hands shook under the tap and she didn’t cry because the shock was still in front of the pain, and shock doesn’t cry.
Shock just stands there holding a plate, waiting for the world to go back to the way it was five minutes ago.
He came out an hour later.
He sat at the kitchen table and put his head in his hands and said I’m sorry, I don’t know what happened, I’ve never done that before, it won’t happen again.
She looked at his face.
It was the face she married.
The face that held her hand at East Coast Park on their third date. The face that cried at the hospital when their son was born. The face that woke her up on her birthday every year with breakfast he couldn’t cook but tried to anyway.
That face said sorry, and she believed it, because the alternative was believing that the man who slapped her and the man sitting at the table were the same person…
And she wasn’t ready for that, because that would mean her marriage contained something she didn’t have a word for yet.
She said okay.
He held her.
She let him.
And the holding felt like the end of something when it was actually the beginning.
The second time was four months later.
They’d been arguing about money.
He’d started a new job but the salary was lower and she was covering more of the bills and he said something about how she always reminded him and she said she didn’t and then his hand moved again.
This time it was a push.
Both hands on her shoulders, hard, into the wall behind her.
The back of her head hit the edge of the kitchen cabinet.
She felt the impact in her teeth.
He apologised within minutes.
Faster this time.
The sorry was quicker because the mechanism was now familiar.
He knew what to say. She knew what she needed to hear.
And the distance between the violence and the tenderness shrank, the way a gap shrinks when you walk the same path too many times.
He bought her flowers.
He cooked dinner, badly, the way he used to when they were dating and he was trying to impress her.
He held her face in his hands and said I’ll never do it again and she felt his palms on her cheeks and her body did two things at the same time.
Her skin leaned into the warmth.
Her shoulders flinched.
The lean won. The flinch was faster, but the lean was stronger, because the lean was connected to 12 years of marriage and a son who was sleeping in the next room and a life she had built with this man’s hands, both versions of them.
She told no one.
Not her mother, who would say leave before she was ready to hear it. Not her colleague, who would look at her differently on Monday, and the look would be worse than the bruise.
The neighbour heard the sound through the wall on the second time and knocked the next morning and asked is everything okay.
She said yes, we just dropped something.
The neighbour nodded because the neighbour wanted to believe her the same way she wanted to believe him.
The third time.
The fifth time.
The seventh.
She stopped counting after the 7th because counting meant the number would keep going and she didn’t want to know how high a number could get in a life she had promised herself would be different from this.
He hit in places the clothes covered.
She learned this the way you learn a language you didn’t choose to study.
The forearm, not the face.
The ribs, not the jaw.
He was careful.
And the carefulness was its own kind of horror, because it meant he was thinking. He wasn’t out of control. He was choosing where to land.
And after every single one, the sorry came.
The sorry was always the same.
The soft voice.
The whole face.
The hand on her cheek, gentle now, the same hand, and the gentleness was so real that it made the violence feel like something she had imagined, or exaggerated, or caused.
She started to wonder if she caused it.
He said she did, sometimes.
Not in those words. In other words. 𝘐𝘧 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘥𝘪𝘥𝘯’𝘵 𝘯𝘢𝘨. 𝘐𝘧 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘥𝘪𝘥𝘯’𝘵 𝘣𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘶𝘱 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘮𝘰𝘯𝘦𝘺. 𝘐𝘧 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘥𝘪𝘥𝘯’𝘵 𝘭𝘰𝘰𝘬 𝘢𝘵 𝘮𝘦 𝘭𝘪𝘬𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵.
And she would search her own behaviour for the thing that made his hand move, because finding it would mean she could stop it…
And stopping it would mean the sorry was real, and the sorry being real would mean her marriage was still the thing she built and not the thing that was breaking her.
That was the trap.
The sorry wasn’t the end of the cycle.
The sorry was the engine.
The sorry was the thing that sent her back to the beginning every time, reset to zero, ready to believe again, because the man who said sorry looked exactly like the man she loved.
She couldn’t leave the man she loved.
She could only leave the man who hit her.
And they lived in the same body. And the body kept saying sorry. And the sorry kept working.
Until one Tuesday, it didn’t.
He came out of the bedroom with the face. The soft voice. The whole sorry. He sat at the kitchen table the way he sat the first time, head in his hands, and said the words.
She stood at the sink.
Her hands were under the tap.
The water was running.
And the sorry landed on something inside her that had changed shape without her noticing.
It didn’t bounce off. It didn’t cut through.
It just… sat there. On the surface. Like a word in a language she used to speak but had quietly forgotten.
She didn’t cry.
She didn’t shout.
She didn’t leave that night.
But something in her was finished. Not broken. Finished.
The way a book is finished.
The last page had turned and there was nothing after it, and the sorry, which used to be the first page of a new chapter, was now just the back cover of a story she had already read too many times.
She dried her hands.
She went to the bedroom. She picked up her phone and opened the contact she had saved two years ago under a name that wouldn’t look suspicious if he checked.
She hadn’t called it.
She had saved it the way you save a fire exit on a map you hope you’ll never need.
But she knew it was there.
She had known for two years.
The distance between saving the number and dialling it was the distance between the woman who believed the sorry and the woman who was standing in the bedroom now, phone in hand, no longer believing.
She pressed call.
===================
In 2024, there were 2,136 new spousal abuse cases reported in Singapore. That number has risen every year since 2021.
Behind every one of those numbers is a woman standing at a sink, wondering if the sorry is real.
If you are in that kitchen right now…
𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝘀𝗼𝗿𝗿𝘆 𝗶𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝘆𝗰𝗹𝗲 𝗿𝗲𝗹𝗼𝗮𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴.
The hand on your face after the hand on your body is the same hand. And the man who says it won’t happen again is saying it again because it will.
You don’t need to be ready to leave tonight.
But save the number.
The same way she did.
Under a name he won’t recognise.
And when the sorry stops working, and one day it will, the number will be there.
AWARE Women’s Helpline: 1800-777-5555 (Mon to Fri, 10am to 6pm)
National Anti-Violence Helpline: 1800-777-0000 (24 hours)
If it’s not safe to call, AWARE offers text chat at aware’s website
𝗬𝗼𝘂 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘀𝗼𝗻 𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗺𝗼𝘃𝗲𝘀.
𝗬𝗼𝘂 𝗻𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿 𝘄𝗲𝗿𝗲.
3am stories. Pass it on.
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