On the night of Lily Bloom's sixteenth birthday, Atlas Corrigan returned to her bedroom window after six weeks in Boston, and the reunion was shattered when Lily's father, Andrew Bloom, discovered them in bed and beat Atlas with a baseball bat. The beating is the novel's primal scene of violence, the event that binds Lily's childhood trauma to her adult marriage, and the moment that forces her to confront the cyclical nature of abuse. It is the night Lily later realizes she has been reliving, the template for every apology she will accept and every bruise she will hide, and the reason she ultimately chooses a different ending for her own daughter.