Andrew Bloom beats Atlas Corrigan with a baseball bat

On the night of Lily Bloom's sixteenth birthday, her father, Andrew Bloom, discovered Atlas Corrigan in Lily's bedroom and beat him with a baseball bat. The attack was so savage that the sound of bones snapping was the only thing piercing through Lily's screams. This single act of violence became a watershed moment in the novel, permanently altering the course of Lily's life, severing her connection to Atlas, and exposing the hypocrisy of a town that would come to revere Andrew as a hero for his brutality.

The Attack and Its Immediate Horror

Lily had not locked her bedroom door that night because she had not expected Atlas to show up. When her father heard her talking to someone and threw open the door to find Atlas in bed with her, he was angrier than Lily had ever seen him. Atlas, unprepared for what came next, was at a complete disadvantage. Lily would never forget the moment for as long as she lived: being completely helpless as her father came down on him with a baseball bat. The sound of bones snapping was the only thing piercing through her screams. The violence was so overwhelming that by the time the police arrived and pulled Andrew off of him, Lily did not even recognize Atlas, he was covered in so much blood. The attack triggered Lily's first and only panic attack; she became so hysterical that she could not breathe, and an ambulance had to be called for her as well as for Atlas.

The Town's Cruel Judgment

In the aftermath, no one would tell Lily where Atlas was or if he was even okay. Her father was not arrested for what he had done. Instead, word got out that Atlas had been staying in an old house and that he had been homeless, and Andrew became revered for his heroic act of saving his little girl from the homeless boy who had manipulated her into having sex with him. Lily's father told her she had shamed their whole family by giving the town something to gossip about, and the gossip persisted. Lily heard a girl named Katie on the bus telling someone that she had tried to warn Lily about Atlas, claiming she knew he was bad news from the moment she laid eyes on him. Lily, furious, turned around and told Katie she could go to hell, insisting that Atlas was a better human than she would ever be and that she would regret saying one more bad thing about him. Katie only rolled her eyes and asked if Atlas had brainwashed her, calling him a dirty, thieving homeless kid who was probably on drugs and had used Lily for food and sex.

The Echo of Abuse in Lily's Later Life

The beating became a template for the abuse Lily would later endure. When Ryle Kincaid first pushed her in the kitchen, knocking her to the floor and cutting her eye on a cabinet door handle, Lily did not hear Ryle's voice; she heard her father's voice apologizing to her mother, Jenny Bloom, saying it was an accident. The pattern of violence followed by apology and remorse was one Lily recognized from her childhood, and it would repeat in her marriage. Lily later reflected that her father never had an excuse for his anger, nor was he immediately apologetic, and that the way he treated her mother was much worse than what had happened between her and Ryle. Yet the memory of the baseball bat beating, and the town's celebration of her father's violence, haunted her understanding of what she deserved and what love was supposed to look like.

The Author's Note and the Cycle of Violence

The author's note reveals that the first incident between Ryle and Lily in the kitchen was what happened the first time her own father ever hit her mother. Her mother was cooking a casserole and her father had been drinking; he pulled the casserole out of the oven without using a pot holder, she thought it was funny and laughed, and the next thing she knew, he had hit her so hard she flew across the kitchen floor. She chose to forgive him for that one incident because his apology and regret were believable, or at least believable enough that giving him a second chance hurt less than leaving with a broken heart would have. Over time, the incidents that followed were similar to the first, with her father repeatedly showing remorse and promising to never do it again. It finally got to a point where she knew his promises were empty, but she was a mother of two daughters by then and had no money to leave. Unlike Lily, her mother did not have a lot of support; there were no local women's shelters and very little government support back then. To leave meant risking not having a roof over their heads, but to her it was better than the alternative. This confession frames the baseball bat beating not as an isolated act of cruelty but as one link in a chain of intergenerational violence that the novel traces from Andrew Bloom's marriage to Jenny, through Lily's own marriage to Ryle, and into the choices Lily must make to break the cycle.