Prologue
Anne
“Where were you yesterday?” he snarls in that cold, threatening voice that cuts deeper than a newly sharpened knife, hurts worse than his fist grabbing my hair, worse than the hot coffee that spilled from the mug in my hands and scorched my legs as he pulled my head back.
I didn’t hear him walk into the kitchen. Didn’t hear him moving in the house when I woke up. I thought he was already gone for the day when I came downstairs. Just another drop in the sea of things I’ve been wrong about.
“I went for a walk,” I answer quietly and tonelessly. He doesn’t like it when I show defiance. That’s one mistake I don’t make anymore.
He started showing me this evil, monstrous side of him slowly, in tiny bite-sized portions, and before I could put all the pieces together into the scary whole that is my life with him now, it was too late. I was trapped. A prisoner in my own home, with no job, no friends, and no money of my own.
He huffs, but I didn’t need to hear that to know my answer displeased him. His fingers tighten in my hair, the pain sharp but distant. Just like everything is distant, including my soul most days, let alone the voice of the woman I used to be—fierce, independent, wild and always ready to fight for what’s right, wherever, whenever. I’m not that woman anymore. I hardly even remember being her.
“You went for a walk?” he scoffs. “It was pouring rain all day. Who did you go and meet?”
“No one,” I say breathlessly.
He pulls my head back even further by my hair, bending my neck back and forcing me to look up at him. I don’t like looking at him. Don’t like the reminder of how much I once enjoyed looking into his face, into his warm eyes brown like chocolate, which are now two hard black stones. In the beginning, he’d take me on lavish vacations, dinners and romantic weekend getaways, each place we visited more glamorous and picture-perfect than the last. He’d also gift me expensive things and tell me how perfect, how smart and how beautiful I was. In the beginning, our married life together was picture-perfect too.
Before I met him, my life was just one long string of failed relationships. So I mistook all that for love—the kind of love not everyone was lucky enough to find. The kind of love that lasts a lifetime. And I held on to that dream for a long time after he started insulting me and, eventually, hitting me. Too long. So long that I forgot who I was, lost myself in the dream that wasn’t, got swallowed up by the nightmare that was.
Looking into his face now feels like looking down a deep black well I’m about to fall into with no chance of avoiding it. I’m already falling, down, down, down, through the darkness, dreading what must come when I hit bottom, but hoping it comes soon to end all this. The woman I used to be is less than a ghost in my mind. She’s more like a wisp of smoke. On most days, I don’t even see the monster he is. It’s just there, something to be wary of, but impossible to escape.
“You have nothing…no one to be jealous of,” I tell him in a very quiet voice. My voice is just a wisp of smoke too.
“I don’t believe you,” he says. “You’ve always been a conniving, dishonest woman underneath that righteous facade of yours. You better not be cheating on me. For your sake and his. And you better be home when I get back today.”
I nod and he finally releases my hair, the pain he caused receding in a wave of tingles back into the fog and smoke that comprise my mind now. It means that I’ve disassociated mentally from my reality. I know the term, and the phenomenon, from my old life where I was an ER nurse and a champion for abused women. It doesn’t help to know it, just as it doesn’t help to acknowledge the irony of me being one of those women now, unable to fight for myself just like them. It just is. I just am. And that’s all.
He smoothes down his tie before buttoning his jacket, his movements cold and methodical, not a hint of the threat he just uttered in his benign actions. The scene is surreal, it seems like we’re just a happily married couple enjoying a cup of coffee before he has to leave for work. The fog in my mind swallows and accepts this too.
