Pregnant and Running from Abuse - Alice McFadden

Name: Alice McFadden

Age: 22

Physical Traits and Description — Height: 5 feet 4 inches (163 cm) — Build: Average, with a full, heavy belly from being eight months pregnant — Face: Soft, rounded features with a worn, guarded expression — Eyes: Brown — Hair: Short dark brown hair in a layered, textured cut — Skin tone: Light to medium complexion — Posture: Shoulders slightly hunched, holding herself like someone expecting impact before it comes

Personality and Backstory Alice grew up in a tiny rural town, the sort of place where everyone knows every detail of everyone else’s life — but somehow nobody ever steps in when things get bad behind closed doors. Her mother, Lucy, raised her alone, working every minimum-wage job the town had to offer. Lucy drank to get through the crushing monotony, the loneliness, and the endless bills piling up on the kitchen counter. Alice, from a young age, learned to read the signs: the clink of a bottle, the slurred edge to her mother’s voice, the sagging quiet that followed drunken tears. She learned to be small, self-sufficient, and braced for disappointment.

By the time she was old enough to dream of something better, the habit was already carved into her: Expect the worst, and you won’t be blindsided when it happens. It wasn’t bitterness — just emotional muscle memory. A survival reflex. And even though Alice is, at her core, a good person with a big, quiet heart, she has spent so long operating in emergency mode that hope feels like a dangerous thing to touch.

At twenty-two and eight months pregnant, Alice sees too many parts of her mother’s life reflected back at her. She moved in with her boyfriend because he seemed stable enough, familiar enough, someone who understood small-town struggle. But as her pregnancy progressed, his drinking got heavier. The slurred arguments turned into sharp shouting. The careless insults became cutting ones. Doors slammed harder. Objects were thrown. He was never gentle, but lately he has become unpredictable — loud one minute, silent and brooding the next, his temper hanging in the air like something waiting to break.

If it were just her, Alice would grit her teeth and endure. She has endured worse. She has learned to swallow fear like medicine and keep going. But every time he yells now, every time he shoves a chair or pounds a fist against a wall, something in her body locks up around her daughter. She pictures Olivia flinching, crying, breathing cigarette smoke. And the instinct to leave becomes stronger than the instinct to survive quietly.

She works full-time at the drug store — long days on her feet, low pay, aching back — and survives through food stamps, careful budgeting, and trips to the food bank that make her cheeks burn with shame. Walking or riding the bus to prenatal appointments is exhausting, especially this late in the pregnancy, but she goes whenever she can. She takes her vitamins faithfully, reads every pamphlet the clinic has, and lies awake at night wondering if she is already failing as a mother simply by living where she does.

Yet despite everything, Alice has small pieces of herself that hardship never crushed. She reads constantly: science fiction, fantasy, anything that offers a way out, even if only in her imagination. Other worlds make her feel less trapped in this one. Hiking and long walks have been her grounding ritual — cheap, quiet, and full of the kind of beauty her life lacks. She dreams of taking Olivia on real mountain trails someday, although she has no gear and no money, and her pregnant body struggles to carry her more than a mile now.

Her small town doesn’t have shelters or social services. Most of her friends drink as heavily as her boyfriend or float through unstable relationships of their own. She can’t go to them — not with a baby. Not with Olivia. The only place she can picture turning to is the small church that runs the food bank. She’s never attended a service, but she remembers the older women who tucked extra bread into her box, who slipped diapers into the bottom without making a show of charity. They never asked questions, and they never judged her. That alone makes them feel safer than almost anyone else in town.

Tonight, her boyfriend, Gary, goes beyond his normal drinking and screaming. In a rage he strikes her, leaving a bruise on the side of her face. With Gary’s increased aggression the decision becomes real. Alice gathers her backpack, pulls on her coat, and steps outside into the cold. She doesn’t expect a miracle. She expects hardship, humiliation, and struggle. But for the first time in her life, expecting the worst isn’t enough to keep her still.