Chapter 5
The fairy tale lasted exactly eight months and three days. I knew the precise timeline because I started counting from the moment everything changed, marking each day that followed like a prisoner carving lines into a cell wall.
It was a Tuesday in November when Dex’s latest gallery exhibit was rejected by the Whitmore Foundation, a prestigious venue that could have launched his career into the stratosphere.
He had been so confident about the submission, spending weeks perfecting his artist statement and selecting just the right pieces to showcase his “evolving vision.” The rejection letter was polite but devastating—standard language about the competitive nature of their exhibitions, empty encouragement about future submissions, the kind of professional courtesy that felt like a slap wrapped in silk.
I found him that evening sitting at our kitchen table, the letter crumpled beside his laptop, an empty whiskey bottle standing like a monument to his disappointment.
We had been married for two months by then, living in a small but charming apartment in Brooklyn.
I had resigned from my marketing job after the wedding, trusting Dex when he said his career—especially with the Whitmore Foundation—was about to take off and that I wouldn’t need to work.
He wanted me to be a housewife, to have a baby, to be there for every milestone—so that our child would have the care and presence he had never received growing up, instead of the cold, distant upbringing he knew all too well.
Now all our expenses were covered by him, and my savings had become part of our joint account, under his management. My independence, once measured by my own paycheck, was gone, folded neatly into the financial world he controlled.
“They don’t understand real talent,” he said when I walked through the door, his words already slurred with alcohol. “It’s all politics. All about who you know, not what you can create.”
I set down my purse and approached him carefully, the way you might approach a wounded animal. “I’m sorry, baby. I know how much this meant to you.”
“Do you?” He looked up at me then, and something in his eyes was different. Harder. “Do you really know what it’s like to pour your soul into something and have it rejected by people who wouldn’t recognize genius if it punched them in the face?”
The edge in his voice made me pause. I’ve seen Dex disappointed before—when galleries passed on his work, when clients chose other artists for commissions—but this felt different. More personal. More volatile.
“Of course I understand,” I said, keeping my voice gentle. “Rejection is hard in any field. But this doesn’t mean anything about your talent. Maybe we could look into other galleries, other opportunities—”
“Other galleries.” He laughed, but there was no humor in it. “Right. Because you’re the expert on the art world now.”
The comment stung, but I tried to push past it. “I’m not an expert. I just wanted to help.”
“Help?” Dex stood up, swaying slightly as he reached for the whiskey bottle and discovered it was empty. “You want to help? Stop pretending you understand what I’m going through. Stop acting like your little marketing job gives you insight into real creativity.”
My cheeks burned with embarrassment and rising anger. “If you hadn’t made me resign, I could’ve helped with our expenses. You wouldn’t have felt so pressured. My marketing job could’ve paid for this apartment, your supplies, the groceries in our refrigerator—”
That was when his hand connected with my cheek.
The slap was sharp and sudden, echoing through our small kitchen like a gunshot. I stumbled backward, more from shock than force, my hand flying to my face as the skin immediately started to burn.
For a moment, we both froze. Dex stared at me with wide eyes, his expression shifting from anger to something that might have been horror. I stood there with my hand pressed to my cheek, trying to process what had just happened.
“Willa,” he whispered. His voice was completely different—broken, desperate. “Oh God, Willa, I’m so sorry.”
I wanted to run. Every instinct screamed at me to grab my purse, walk out the door, and never come back. But I also saw the devastation on his face, the way his hands started shaking as the alcohol and adrenaline wore off.
“I didn’t mean to,” he continued, taking a step toward me before stopping himself. “I would never—You know I’m not that kind of person.”
And the terrible thing was, I believed him.
Or thought I did. The Dex who courted me for four months, who brought me flowers, listened to my problems, and made me feel valued—that man would never have raised his hand to me.
This felt like an aberration, a moment of weakness brought on by disappointment and too much alcohol.
“You hurt me,” I said, my voice barely audible.
“I know. I know, and I hate myself for it.” Tears streamed down his face.
“I was so stressed about money, about my career. Everything was falling apart, and I took it out on you because you were the only good thing in my life. The only thing I couldn’t afford to lose.
And I couldn’t let my goddamn parents be right—about me being a failure, about art being a childish dream. ”
He reached for me then, slowly, as if afraid I might bolt. When I didn’t pull away, he gathered me into his arms and held me while he cried against my hair.
“I’ll never do it again,” he whispered. “I swear on my grandmother’s grave, I will never hurt you again. Please don’t leave me. Please, Willa. I couldn’t lose you, too.”
I stood there in his arms, my cheek still stinging, trying to decide what to do.
The rational part of my brain knew this was a red flag: men who hit their partners once usually hit again.
But the louder part of me—the part that had been lonely for so long, that had finally found someone who chose me first—wanted to believe him.
Because if I left, what then? I would go back to my empty apartment, my empty life, my endless cycle of wondering what was wrong with me that Kieran Cross had been able to walk away so easily. At least with Dex, I mattered enough to fight for. At least with Dex, I was worth wanting.
“It can’t happen again,” I said into his shoulder. “Ever.”
“It won’t. I promise you.”
For three weeks, he kept that promise.
He was the perfect guy again—attentive, apologetic, constantly bringing me small gifts and tokens of affection. He cut back on his drinking, started going to the gym to work off his stress, and even began seeing a therapist who specialized in anger management.
“I want to be the man you deserve,” he told me one night as we lay in bed together. “I want to be someone you can depend on.”
I wanted to believe him. I chose to believe him. Because the alternative—admitting that I had made a terrible mistake, that Jude had been right to worry, that I had been so desperate to prove Kieran wrong I chose the first man who paid attention to me—was too painful to accept.
The next incident happened three weeks later, when I came home late after visiting Jennifer—the only friend I had made while I was still working. Dex was waiting up for me, pacing our living room like a caged animal.
“Where were you?” he asked the moment I walked through the door.
“I was with Jen, like I told you. It ran later than expected.”
“Until midnight?”
I kicked off my heels, already exhausted from a long day and not in the mood for an interrogation. “The kind where you just keep talking and laughing, and before you know it, hours have passed—you lose track of time. I hadn’t seen her since our wedding, and we just got carried away catching up.”
“I don’t like that bitch,” he said, his jaw tightening as he glanced away.
There was something ugly in his voice, a bitterness that made me look at him more carefully. His eyes were bloodshot, and I smelled alcohol on his breath despite his promises to cut back on drinking.
“Dex, are you drunk?”
“Does it matter?” he slurred, eyes narrowing. “You were probably too busy flirting with every guy in that bar with her to think about me sitting here alone.”
“I wasn’t flirting with anyone. I was just hanging out with a friend.”
“Right,” he snapped, his voice tight. “Hanging out with someone who still has a life and a social world. Of course you’d rather be out there than sitting here with me.”
We’d had this argument before, always in different forms. Dex resented every trace of my life before him—my friendships, my confidence, even the independence I used to have—especially when measured against his unpredictable art sales.
His irritation lurked beneath the surface of our relationship and bubbled up whenever he drank too much or faced another rejection.
“That’s not what I said.”
“It’s what you meant.” He stepped closer to me, and I instinctively stepped back. “You think you’re better than me. You think I’m a loser.”
“I think I’m tired, and I want to go to bed.”
I tried to walk past him toward the bedroom, but he grabbed my arm. Not hard enough to bruise, but firm enough to stop me.
“Don’t walk away from me when I’m talking to you.”
“Let go of me, Dex.”
“Not until you admit what it was really about. You’re ashamed of me. Ashamed that your husband wasn’t some hotshot businessman in a thousand-dollar suit.”
The description hit too close to home, conjuring an immediate image of Kieran in his expensive clothes and confident smile. I felt my face flush with guilt and anger.
“Let. Go. Of. Me.”
Instead, his grip tightened. “You were thinking about him right then, weren’t you? Your brother’s friend. The one you were still hung up on.”
My blood turned to ice. “What are you talking about?”
“You thought I didn’t know? You thought I didn’t notice the way you got that look on your face sometimes—like you were remembering something that made you sad? You thought I didn’t know why you couldn’t fully commit to us?”
“You’re being paranoid.”
“Was I? Because I thought you were still in love with someone else. I thought you were with me because you couldn’t have him. Is that why you didn’t want to be pregnant with me?”
The accusation was so close to the truth that I panicked. I remembered the birth control pills tucked away in my drawer—the ones I started taking again because I wasn’t ready to be a mother, not then, not like this. I couldn’t say that out loud.
“You’re drunk, and you’re being ridiculous,” I said, my voice tighter than I meant it to be. “Let go of me so I can go to bed.”
“Admit it,” he said, his fingers digging into my arm now. “Admit that you settled for me.”
“I didn’t settle for anything. I chose you.”
“Liar.”
He shook me then, just once, but hard enough to make my teeth click together. I looked into his face and saw something that terrified me—not just anger, but a kind of desperate rage that seemed capable of anything.
“You’re hurting me,” I whispered.
For a moment, I thought he might not stop. I saw something flicker across his features that looked almost like enjoyment. Then, abruptly, he released me and stepped back.
“I’m sorry,” he said immediately, but this time the apology sounded different. More practiced. Less sincere. “I didn’t mean to grab you. I just—I hated feeling like I was already losing you.”
I rubbed my arm where his fingers had left red marks that would fade into bruises by morning. “You are not losing me. But you can’t put your hands on me like that.”
“I know. You’re right. I’m sorry.”
As I got ready for bed that night, I caught sight of myself in the bathroom mirror and saw something that made my stomach drop. The red marks on my arm were clearly visible—finger-shaped impressions that darkened overnight.
I stared at my reflection and tried to remember when I became the kind of woman who made excuses for a man who left marks on her body. When I started accepting apologies for things that were supposed to be unforgivable.
The answer was simple and devastating: the moment I decided that being chosen by the wrong person was better than not being chosen at all.
Standing there in our bathroom, looking at the evidence of what my relationship was becoming, I finally understood what Jude saw that I missed—what my brother’s instincts picked up on that first night when he watched Dex perform his charm like a carefully rehearsed act.
I touched my swollen lip from that night’s beating, the one that was so much worse than anything that came before, and realized I had been living this story for two years. Two years of escalation, of boundaries crossed and redrawn, of apologies that meant less and less each time they were offered.
I knew, even then, that my brother was right about everything.
But knowing and acting were two different things, and I was too afraid of being alone to choose freedom over the familiar prison I built with a man who promised to love me and delivered something else entirely.