Chapter 19 Light Through the Cracks #2
If I had known she was going to go to him I would have stopped her, but Grace never listened to anyone.
Dr. Feelgood cut into the lump on her leg, didn’t biopsy it, and didn’t follow protocol—he just straight up cut.
He started pulling black gunk out of her, and nothing about it sounded right when she came home and told me.
I always remembered what Bill said: Once they start cutting on you, you’re never the same.
It didn’t take long for cancer to spread all over her body, and overnight, Grace was sick.
It was like he opened Pandora’s box in her body when he cut her open that day.
One minute, we were hanging by the pool, and the next, she was sick as a dog and moved out to Arizona for cancer treatments so she could be closer to family.
I was stuck in that big house all on my own, afraid of losing my best friend, and afraid of my violent boyfriend.
* * *
A SUGAR DADDY HAD JUST paid for me to have surgery, and I was laid up trying to recover.
Just to be a dick, Karma went through my phone and found videos of this dude and me together.
I would fuck him whenever Karma and I were on the outs.
He knew about him—I never hid it, but it was an excuse to get angry.
Of course, I had found a video of him fucking another girl once when we were fighting. We were tit for tat.
I was fresh out of surgery, completely helpless with tubes hanging out of me, sitting on a donut pillow so the fat transfer to my ass would settle, and this man just kept screaming in my face.
He didn’t hit me that day, at least—I was already a wounded soldier—but I remember sitting thinking to myself, As soon as I’m able to walk, I’m moving out of here.
With Grace gone, there was no protection for me in my house.
I needed to be around people. I figured that if I lived in a high-rise condo with neighbors, at least someone would hear me scream if Karma tried to put his hands on me.
So I moved. I was trying like hell to shake him, but of course, the codependency mixed with fear just kept me in the same cycle.
He’d try to talk sweet to me to keep me, but he couldn’t stay sweet for long.
Neither of us knew how to let the other one go.
Luckily, God intervened—he knew I would never have left Karma had something not come between us. And I’m not talking about another man.
One afternoon, I was hanging with my girl Emily at my condo when a jail number started blowing up my phone. Dude was in fucking jail.
“You fucking did this, didn’t you?” he yelled. “You set me up.”
“What the fuck are you talking about? How the fuck would I set you up? Try calling your other fucking girlfriend,” I said.
He was being held in Nevada while the law was trying to extradite him to Oklahoma City.
I visited him a few times with my eyes still black and blue from the last time he hit me.
It took years for those bruises to fully fade.
When I finally did go to the hospital for my eyes because I was so scared I was going to go blind, the doctor told me he had only seen injuries like mine in women who had died from strangulation, and that I had a cracked orbital bone.
He wanted to run more tests but because Cindy was there reporting everything back to Karma, I declined.
Even so, I felt I needed to be there for Karma while we figured out this prison shit.
I don’t want to see anyone go to prison, and I felt bad for him.
I’d told his ass so many times he was a sloppy dealer.
Plus I knew that if he got out and I didn’t have his back, there would be hell to pay.
So Cindy and I tried to find a lawyer to get him out.
Apparently, the feds had been investigating Karma for five years. They had so much proof and even associates who turned on him. He was transferred to Oklahoma and indicted on money laundering, ghost weed, and trafficking drugs across state lines.
I found out that Cindy had snitched on him and put the nail in his proverbial coffin.
I fucking knew she was a snitch. She testified against him in exchange for immunity—on Valentine’s Day of all days—behind his back while he was still free, years before he was indicted, and never told him.
She went about life with him like everything was fine, and it was her dirty little secret.
When I told him, he didn’t believe me, but court records don’t lie.
And when he was shown the proof, he still stayed with this woman even after he had promised me he wouldn’t.
He was placed under house arrest in Oklahoma City, and I stayed out there with him while he was waiting on his sentence.
But even my loyalty to him couldn’t keep him from his cash cow, Cindy, and when I found out, I went back to Vegas.
What part of the game is that? You preach so much about being an outlaw and a gangster but the woman you’ve been with for twenty-plus years snitches on you to the feds and you stay with her?
It might sound crazy, but that was the last straw. You beat me, you broke my spirit, you fucking damn near ruined my life. But you stay with a woman who snitched on you and still call yourself a gangster? I was done.
* * *
WITH KARMA LOCKED UP, I finally started to feel free from him.
Actually, I was running around like a wild banshee.
It was like the shackles had been taken off me—even though Cindy was watching my every move online and reporting back to him.
By then, Jelly had gotten wind that Karma was locked up and started poking his head around me online too.
When I reached out to one of J’s friends and told him to give J my number, we reconnected.
The last conversation I had with Karma while he was in prison, he told me I was “crossing lines” by talking to Jelly even though he and J were never friends.
“I’m going to cross lines from here to Nashville, baby. Fuck you,” I gleefully replied. We didn’t speak the rest of his five-year sentence.
Still, our trauma bond was the hardest one to break in my entire life.
It took years for me to stop feeling bad for him, like I had abandoned him while he was in prison—even after all he did to me.
People don’t realize that abusive relationships warp your mind into a sick, twisted infatuation with the pain and the person.
I know now what I didn’t know then: Love isn’t supposed to hurt.
Not physically, not emotionally, not spiritually.
And us women just know when something isn’t right.
We know when we’re trying to make the impossible work.
But I’m telling you this right now: He will never change.
It will never get better. It will only get worse.
Most abusive men are more in love with their own egos than they could ever be with you.
If you start seeing the red flags gleaming, run.
And it will be the hardest fight of your life, especially us women with daddy issues.
If you’re like me, you’re drawn to the high-passion, low-emotion dynamic.
But all that’s going to do is drain your looks, finances, and soul.
Don’t wait until you’re dead because you want to be a ride or die.
Love yourself enough to walk away and never look back.
It’s taken a long time to really let it all go. I don’t ever want to hate anyone. I’m just not wired that way. But how he acted after prison is what has truly shown me who he’s always been—and it’s made it easier to close my heart to him.
To this day, Karma denies everything he did to me, even though I have police reports and pictures that would turn your stomach.
I’ve got hospital records. I’ve got pictures of the whites of my eyes gone blood red from his fists and from strangling me.
My eyes swollen so tight I couldn’t open them for weeks.
Cracked ribs, strangled vocal cords, and so many black eyes. You wouldn’t believe the paper trail.
I’ve tried so hard to work through the damage that man caused.
I’ve forgiven him—and to this day, I am still friends with all my exes.
Can you believe it? Hell, I still help the daughter of one of my exes financially.
I still help Paulie. I help all my childhood friends.
I try to give back to the people who stood by my side in my life, even if our relationships weren’t always perfect.
I thought I could do that with Karma when he got out of prison—but honestly, I don’t owe that man anything.
He has messaged me for years saying he loves me and will win me back—I tell him there is no chance I’m leaving my husband for him.
I’ve talked to him numerous times just to hear him out, and I’ve tried to be his friend—because in some sick way, I thought it would help me heal.
I’ve even seen him, but it only triggered my nervous system and I ended up running away from him within minutes.
I’ve also offered to help him financially, because when he went to prison, I gave away all his clothes in a fit of rage and have felt bad about that ever since.
He refused the money but will still hold out for a payday from whatever tabloid will hear him out with a story about me.
I did all this because I felt bad about what had happened between us—and to get some closure for that chapter of my life. But I have learned that closure is a lie. I’ll never get the apology or understanding I so desperately needed from him. And that has to be okay.
When he found out I was writing this book, Karma blew up.
He gaslit the shit out of me and told me, once again, that he never touched me.
He’s told me I’m lying and embellishing the story of abuse when I’m simply stating facts.
As if there aren’t police records. And he’s said he’s dead set on clearing his name even though I’ve never told anyone who he is—Karma’s not his real name. I’m smarter than that.
He’s even gone so far as to try to sell sex tapes of us to news outlets.
Random people message me and tell me how he’ll be drunk in a bar showing sex videos of us.
He goes online and trashes my husband and me almost weekly.
He’s even said publicly that he will sell our story to the highest bidder.
Deep down, he’s proud of what he’s done.
What he did. When my face was black and blue, he’d take me out and make sure his friends could see the evidence.
I’m so sad I let him. Years later, I know that I can’t help or save him.
Some people are just pure evil. And this is my truth, and I’ll never let someone silence me.
This shit is my testimony, and like I’ve told him, he’s only a chapter in my life.
That relationship was the most gut-wrenching, humbling, put-me-on-my-ass reality check I’ve ever had.
It blew my ego to pieces. Before that relationship, I was an awful human.
I hurt people, and I had no remorse. I sure as hell couldn’t be told otherwise.
You might not believe me, but I’m thankful for my time with Karma, even if I couldn’t understand where it was leading me at the time.
It truly set me on the path I’m on today. It brought me to my knees.
I’m telling this story so women in my situation can say, Damn, she went through all that—Karma and everything before. She had nothing to show for her life or herself but heartache, loss, and scars. She was locked in addiction. She was a terrible human. She used people. She let herself be used.
And she changed.
She rose like a phoenix from the ashes and I can too.
Remember, if you keep carrying old bricks, you’ll keep building the same house.
Drop that brick.
Build something stunning.