Breaking Point

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This is a We Write, finish the story from FreeWriteHouse. The contest post is here:
https://steemit.com/wewrite/@freewritehouse/we-write-i-write-you-write-win-8-sbi

The beginning of this story written by @zeldacroft is shown in italics below. My story continues after.

With a gentle click, the door closed behind her. Dragged down by her heavy, black coat, she stood still in the dim mudroom. The sense of an empty, silent house was overwhelming. It felt off, the way a dream mimicking reality never feels quite right. But this was real.
She tried taking a step further inside, and then another. Each time was methodic and careful, as if her legs would give out. Through numbness and lost thoughts, she found herself at the edge of the dining room. The curtains were drawn closed, leaving the room in reflective shadows. The familiarity was faint too, echoed in the faded wallpaper, the framed photos.
Hesitantly, she placed her hand on the back of a dining chair, feeling the cool, smooth wood against her skin. A choking sensation arose as her eyes welled with tears. They spilt as she let go of the chair to try and wipe them away. How am I supposed to do this?
It was then that she noticed the light leaking in from the next room. The blinding shards, cast against the dark floor, interrupted her despair. With curious trepidation she followed them into the cozy kitchen, which was illuminated by the brightness beaming in from the window. She saw the golden glow softening the shadows, the gilded highlights sparking on the sink, and the evergreen trees beyond, basking in the daylight.

How could such a normal homey visage exist in this place? They told her she must come back, face her demons, make peace with the horrific memories. This was yet another thing she was remembering. The sense of a dual reality, where on one hand everything seemed normal, even cheerful, yet underlying it was the exact opposite. She searches diligently for one of the few good memories brought on by this peaceful sunny kitchen, finding at last a simple one of a rare happy Sunday morning helping her mother make blueberry pancakes for breakfast.

But as usual, the bad memories came flooding back. The one she was here to face, the one she had labeled in her mind "breaking point". The one of her drunken enraged father towering over her timid mother ready to smash a fist against her fragile face. As the memory unfolds in her mind a neighbor knocked on the door and suddenly the world did a sickening shift. Her father seating himself in his recliner and her mother wiping the tears from her face and answering the door. A hour of pleasant conversation while all during the ordinary visit, her stomach roiled and the hives broke out across her stomach in contemplation of the neighbor's leaving.

Reliving her memory, she hears the car starting and see herself look up fearfully from her place on the bottom step of the stairwell. Just as she knew it would happen, her father had leaped from his chair and started in with his drunken tirade at the exact point that he had dropped it before. She sees her mother being backed into the kitchen until she was trapped against the sink, pleading with her husband to stop. She sees herself, as a child, still sitting on the stairs holding hands over her ears, trying to blot out the sounds.

But nothing could blot out the sounds that came next. The thud of fist against flesh and her mother's cries. Then a final blow and the sound of bone crunching. In her mind's eye she sees her mother slide down to the floor and blood from the side of her skull covering the heavy ceramic sink and flowing to puddle around her unmoving body on the floor. She knew instantly that her father had finally done it, he'd finally killed her this time.

And this was the point that her memory stopped. This is what she had come back to face, to try and recover, as much as she did not want to. She knew from reading the transcripts and many years of therapy that she had reached her breaking point that day. That she had somehow grabbed the poker from the fireplace and rushed at her father with it. That as he tried to wrest it from her he slipped in her mother's blood and came down chest first on the poker, impaling himself with it. That she had sat for hours on her perch on the bottom step watching him bleed to death before being discovered the next morning.

It was 15 years ago today that this tragedy had taken place. It was too late for her mother, too late for her father. Was it forever to be too late for herself as well?