July 29th 2021
Craig didn’t press charges. Though he’d been on the fence about it.
After the five-day restraining order was lifted, he wanted to talk.
He told me that the district attorney for the city had reached out to him about pressing charges on me, meaning I’d face up to five years in jail for domestic assault.
All this while over a nice dinner, he thought he’d treat me too.
He was understanding of the situation. Had said that he understood mentally I was dealing with a lot, and he hadn’t been patient like I had needed him to be.
Did he mean it? It wasn’t exactly an apology, and he never acknowledged the fact that he had struck me first. Was it worth fighting over and having him follow through with the charges?
I left dinner that night with a firm understanding of what he was offering me.
If I stayed with him, the charges would go away, and I’d only face up to two years of probation time, unsupervised.
If I continued to push him away, he’d have no choice but to try to ‘force’ me to get the help I desperately needed in his eyes.
It wasn’t much of a choice at all. It was an ultimatum that dictated my entire future. My career, my sister, Riley, everything I’d worked so hard to accomplish would be gone within the blink of an eye, all because I couldn’t let him get away with striking out at me.
I agreed that I would start therapy, another one of his veiled conditions to drop the charges.
Under the guise of showing the court that I really was willing to work on myself.
Even though the words had come out of my mouth, I was merely the puppet on his strings.
He made my choices, he dictated what would make my life easier; it was all under his control.
Standing up in court, I didn’t even try to deny his version of events. Anything I had to say wouldn’t have mattered in the end.