Chapter 6
The car came to a halt, and somewhere in the distance I heard someone calling my name, but I couldn’t make out the words through the fog settling over my mind.
Sounds blurred together—voices, footsteps, the dull ringing in my ears—until nothing felt distinct anymore.
I didn’t understand what was happening to me, only that everything hurt and nothing felt real.
Was it bad? Was I dying?
Jude. Oh, Jude. I should have listened to him. He had seen right through Dex from the very beginning, tried to warn me, and I had been too stubborn and too desperate to hear him.
And Kieran…God, Kieran. I should have told him I never stopped loving him. I should have been brave enough to fight for what we had instead of running toward the first man who made me feel wanted, even if it was only an illusion.
But those realizations came too late, didn’t they? My consciousness kept slipping away, loosening its grip, pulling me back into the memories that had led me here. Back to the year when the trap slowly, methodically closed around me, until escape no longer seemed possible.
Over the next year, Dex’s drinking increased alongside his failures in the art world.
Each rejection, each bad review, each lost client resulted in me paying the price when he came home.
I became an expert at concealing bruises with makeup, at making excuses for why I couldn’t meet friends, at walking on eggshells around a man who once made me feel like the most important person in his world.
What frightened me most was how ordinary it all began to feel, as if this new version of my life had quietly rewritten the rules while I wasn’t looking.
The progression was so gradual that I almost missed it happening.
After the first slap, there were three weeks of perfect behavior.
After the arm-grabbing incident, it was two weeks.
Then ten days. Then less than a week between episodes, until I found myself living in a constant state of hypervigilance, never knowing what might set him off.
I started measuring time not in dates or seasons, but in the space between apologies.
It started with his gallery job. Andrew Winslow—no relation to my old name, just a cruel coincidence—was the gallery owner who hired Dex part-time to help with installations and customer service.
For six months, it was steady work that helped pay our bills and gave Dex exposure to the art world he was desperate to break into.
I clung to that period as proof that things could still be normal, that we were only going through a rough patch.
Then Andrew hired a new artist for a solo show, Anastasia Zarin, a twenty-six-year-old painter whose abstract landscapes sold faster than the gallery could hang them. She was everything Dex wanted to be—young, successful, critically acclaimed, financially secure from her art alone.
“She’s not even that good,” Dex said one night after coming home from work, the smell of alcohol already heavy on his breath. “Her technique is sloppy. She just painted pretty colors and called it deep.”
I made dinner, putting together pasta and the vegetables I’d picked up earlier. “Maybe people connect with her work because it makes them feel something,” I suggested carefully, keeping my eyes on the stove.
“Feel something,” he repeated, his voice dripping with disdain. “You mean feel good about themselves for buying something expensive and trendy.”
The bitterness in his voice worsened over the months. Every success story he encountered at the gallery became a personal affront—evidence of a world conspiring against his talent.
“I’m sure your opportunity will come,” I said, because that was what he needed to hear. That was what kept the peace.
“When?” he snapped. “When I’m forty? Fifty? When I’ve wasted my whole life waiting for someone to recognize what I could do?”
I served dinner in silence, watching him drink wine we couldn’t afford and complain about people who had achieved what he wanted.
It became our nightly routine—him venting his frustrations while I absorbed his anger like a sponge, trying to keep it from overflowing into violence.
Some nights I counted my breaths between his words, bracing myself for what might come next.
But it didn’t always work.
The night Anastasia Zarin’s show opened, Dex came home drunk and furious. The gallery was packed, her paintings sold with red dots appearing next to them faster than Andrew could keep track, and Dex was forced to smile and congratulate her while his own work remained unsold in the storage room.
“She sold twelve pieces,” he said, stumbling through our front door at nearly midnight. “Twelve. In one night. Do you know how much money that was?”
I waited up for him, knowing better than to go to bed when he was in that kind of mood. “That’s wonderful for her,” I said carefully.
“Wonderful for her,” he repeated mockingly. “Right. Because mediocrity is rewarded.”
“Dex, maybe we should get you some water—”
“I don’t want water. I want what she has. I want what everyone else seems to get handed to them while I’m stuck hanging other people’s art and pretending to care about their success.”
He grabbed my wrist then, his fingers wrapping around it like a vise. “Do you know what she said to me tonight? She said she admired my ‘dedication to art.’ My dedication. Like I was some kind of charity case.”
The grip was tight enough to cut off circulation, but I had learned not to cry out when he hurt me. Crying only made things worse.
“I’m sure she meant it as a compliment,” I said.
“Compliment?” he snapped, torment twisting his voice. “You think that’s a compliment? I bust my ass trying to do something real, and all they do is reject my work.”
His grip tightened until I felt my fingers start to tingle. When I looked down, I saw his knuckles had gone white with the force.
“You’re hurting me,” I whispered.
“Good,” he said, and the casual cruelty in his voice was worse than the physical pain. “Maybe now you understand how I feel every day.”
He released me then and stumbled toward the bedroom, leaving me standing in the living room, cradling my wrist and trying not to cry. The bruises took two weeks to fade completely, and I wore long sleeves every time I went out to hide them, even when the weather didn’t justify it.
That was the pattern for months. His failures became my punishments, his disappointments became my pain. I learned to read his moods like weather patterns, to predict when storms were coming and take shelter accordingly. Survival became a skill I practiced daily.
I also learned to lie with stunning creativity.
“I fell down the stairs,” I told Jennifer when she noticed me favoring my left leg after Dex shoved me into our coffee table during an argument about money.
“I walked into a door,” I explained to our neighbor, Mrs. Patterson, when she commented on the bruise around my eye that makeup didn’t quite conceal.
“I’m just clumsy” became my standard response to any concerned questions about cuts, bruises, or the way I started flinching when people moved too quickly around me.
The lies got easier with practice, and that terrified me more than the violence itself.
I adapted quickly to a world where truth was dangerous, where honesty could result in broken ribs, black eyes, or nights spent locked in the bathroom while Dex raged outside the door.
The faster I adjusted, the further away my old self seemed.
My friends drifted away, one by one. Not all at once, which might have forced me to confront what was happening, but gradually. Canceled dinner plans. Declined invitations. Conversations that grew shorter and less frequent until they stopped altogether.
“You weren’t up for anything anymore,” Jennifer said during what turned out to be our last lunch together. “Every time I asked you to go out, you had an excuse.”
I wanted to tell her the truth—that going out became a minefield of potential triggers for Dex’s jealousy, that staying home and keeping him calm had become my full-time job. Instead, I made another excuse and watched one of my last connections to the outside world slip away.
The isolation was intentional on Dex’s part, though I didn’t recognize it at the time. He systematically cut me off from anyone who might have offered support, anyone who might have helped me see that what was happening wasn’t normal or acceptable.
“Your friends didn’t really understand our relationship,” he said after I canceled plans for the third time to avoid one of his moods. “They were jealous of what we had.”
“Why would they be jealous?”
“Because we had something real. Something deeper than their superficial friendships and casual hookups. They couldn’t understand the kind of love that required sacrifice.”
Sacrifice. That was how he framed my isolation, my bruises, my constant fear. Not as abuse, but as proof of our special connection. Evidence that what we had was worth fighting for, worth suffering for.
I wanted to believe him because the alternative—accepting that I was trapped in an abusive relationship—was too terrifying to contemplate. If I admitted the truth to myself, I knew I would have to do something about it. And doing something about it meant facing the possibility of being alone again.
The phone call from Jude came on a rainy Thursday in March, ten months into the new reality I lived in.
I was at home, chopping vegetables for dinner, my ribs still sore from where Dex had elbowed me during an argument the night before.
The dull ache didn’t stop me from moving through the kitchen—routine was easier than thinking—but when the phone rang, I froze with the knife in my hand.
“Hey, Will.” My brother’s voice sounded distant and tinny through the international connection. “How are you doing?”
“I’m good,” I lied automatically. “Really good. How are you? Where are you calling from?”
“I can’t say exactly, but I want to talk to you about something important.” He paused, and I heard voices in the background—other soldiers going about their business. “I’ve been thinking a lot about purpose lately. About what it means to protect people.”
Something in his voice made me sit up straighter. “What do you mean?”
“I enlisted because I felt called to serve, to protect people who couldn’t protect themselves. And being here, seeing what I’ve seen…it made me realize how important that calling really is.”
I felt tears prick my eyes, though I wasn’t sure why. “You’re doing important work, Jude.”
“I know. But, Will, I need you to understand something. Protection isn’t just about soldiers and civilians. Sometimes the people who need protecting most are the ones closest to us.”
My throat tightened. Did he know? Did he somehow sense what was happening to me from thousands of miles away? I pressed my free hand against my chest, trying to slow my breathing.
“I don’t understand,” I whispered.
“If you ever need me—if you ever need protection—you call me. Okay? No matter what time it is, no matter where I am, you call me.”
I wanted to tell him everything then. About the bruises. About the fear. About how I had slowly become a stranger to myself. But Dex was working from home that day, and I knew he could overhear every word from our bedroom.
“Okay,” I said instead. “I will.”
“Promise me, Will.”
“I promise.”
But even as I made that promise, I knew I wouldn’t keep it.
Jude had enough to worry about without adding my problems to his burden.
He risked his life to protect strangers; the least I could do was handle my own problems without dragging him into them.
That was what I told myself, anyway. It felt easier than admitting how afraid I was.
After I hung up, I stood in the kitchen with the knife still in my hand and cried quietly—for the brother who always tried to take care of me, even from the other side of the world; for the girl I used to be, who would have told him the truth without hesitation; and for the woman I had become, who was too ashamed and too afraid to ask for help.
After a while, when the aroma of dinner filled the apartment and I was setting the table, Dex came out of the bedroom with a warm smile—the kind that had once made my heart leap.
“I was thinking,” he said as we sat down to the takeout he’d ordered from my favorite restaurant, “we should start planning a real vacation. Somewhere tropical, just the two of us.”
For a moment, I felt hope flutter in my chest. It was small and fragile, but it was there. Maybe things could get better. Maybe this was him trying to make an effort, trying to rebuild what we had lost.
“That sounds wonderful,” I said.
“Good. Because I thought we needed time away from all the stress and distractions. Time to focus on each other…and maybe finally talk about starting a family—only if you’re ready.”
He reached across the table and took my hand, his thumb stroking across my knuckles in a gesture that once made my heart race.
“I love you, Willa. I know I haven’t always shown it the right way, but everything I do is because I can’t bear the thought of losing you.”
I squeezed his hand and smiled, because that was what was expected of me. Because I still believed, despite everything, that love was supposed to hurt sometimes. That relationships required sacrifice and compromise, and the willingness to weather difficult storms.
I had no idea the worst storm was still coming.
The night of Dex’s gallery showing—the night I saw Kieran again and immediately knew he was avoiding me—was the night everything finally fell apart.