The house was empty but I locked the bathroom door anyway. Living alone was not something I was used to. I chewed the skin inside my mouth contemplatively and stared at my almost emaciated frame in the bathroom mirror. Why I found myself wearing only underwear and a bra, I couldn’t tell you. The house was silent. And it was heavy. Tipping my head slowly to one side, I strained my focus and conducted a self-autopsy of sorts. In a desperate attempt to recognize who I was, I searched for any familiar scars or distinguishing marks that might transform the stranger in the mirror back into me. As I scrutinized every inch of my body, I noticed a small discoloration of skin on my right arm. I lifted my forearm for closer inspection and then stared at it blankly. It took me an entire minute to remember how the mark had gotten there. The fact that I couldn’t remember this event, which I know was traumatic at the time, was ridiculous and upsetting to me. It was a part of my life. It had literally scarred me. It then was the basis of ongoing family jokes for years. And I couldn’t remember how it happened. Finally it dawned on me—six stitches from throwing the cat in the pool when I was twelve. The cat’s claw tore my arm open as he tried to cling to me. Standard operating procedure followed: Mom bundles me into car en route immediately to emergency room where I am the recipient of emergency care and no judgement from her. I managed to smile for half a second as I remembered how hot it had been that day, and how angry Mom had been with me in the moments that followed the incident. The thermometer had soared to 100 degrees that day. Why wouldn’t the cat want to go in the pool? Hello! It was a natural solution for the furry little mammal that no doubt was melting in the summer heat. Enthused by this small self-identification success, I continued my examination. Tilting my head back, I ran my fingers along the bottom of my jaw line. When I reached my chin, I stopped at what felt like a hole in the mandible. I closed my eyes and exhaled. Yes, I know now, my mind whispered. The impression came from a leftover scar from a small but semi-horrifying incident on an isolated farm near my hometown in regional Colorado. My parents had left me alone for a mere five minutes. In that unsupervised moment, I managed to lift up a small ax and slice open my chin. Quite impressive coordination skills, my mom and dad must have thought as they raced me 500 miles to the nearest hospital, fearing I was about to die of blood loss. Standard operating procedure implemented again: en route to emergency room where I was yet again the recipient of multiple stitches and zero judgement from Mom.

I rested my thumb across the scar and stared deeply into the mirror. My eyes stung as the tears welled up. I said my name out loud. “Antonia.” Even that sounded somehow foreign to me. I know who I am, I think. I’m a really bad version of Antonia, the Antonia who lost her appetite for life over a year ago, the Antonia who is ‘not allowed’ to talk to her family or any of her friends, the Antonia who is apparently not allowed to eat most types of foods, listen to anything but chamber music, or read fashion magazines, because her boyfriend will not allow it. The Antonia who can’t stop crying and doesn’t know why. In the bathroom and the bedroom, in changing rooms at department stores, in the car, in bookstores, in the dark edit rooms at work, and occasionally at cafés when I’m eating alone, I often lose the battle to not break down. Everywhere. All the time. You would think that there would be nothing left to cry about, or no more tears left, but I seem to have an infinite supply of both. I find that people know too, when you’re on the verge of having a meltdown. Somehow they just sense it. They also know that if they acknowledge your just-about-to-lose-control scenario, they will be the one who has to try to find the right thing to say to you and, in that awkward moment, offer you tissues and a glass of water. It was utterly unfair to blame a young waitress for a polite gesture but I always wondered, why a glass of water? Have you got anything else besides water and tissues to help me stitch my life back together? I suspect a glass of water isn’t going to help me in this moment. Do you happen to have something as strong as a horse tranquilizer? A sharp instrument? Do you know where the closest cliff would happen to be located? A freeway overpass? What about an old-fashioned set of train tracks? I’m pretty conservative, after all. I’ll just keep my last few moments simple. I always wanted to say, ‘Actually, I feel like I’m dying. I’m in so much pain that I might actually die later today. What else do you have on offer that might stop me from taking my life?’ If you have any ideas, I’m open to them, I have nothing else to do today except try not to harm myself because I hate myself that much. And because my boyfriend, who I apparently love more than myself, is having lunch with another girl today in town. He thinks I don’t know, but I saw him with her. He told me he was in court, but he’s a liar. I’m secretly devastated. I just sent him a text telling him that, instead of picking him up after work, he could ‘fucking walk home.’ I will not be taken for granted. I do anxiety and doubt pretty well, but I don’t do ‘taken for granted.’ Is there anything worse than someone thinking you’ll always be there, always take them back, always believe them, always care, always love you? When in fact, the very core of a meaningful relationship is the understanding and awareness that someone can opt out at any given moment? In a split second, bring you entire world apart? It’s a voluntary position, being with someone. That’s what most people miss: that the person sitting across the table from you can choose to be in a hundred different places that very moment, but they chose you. Over everything. In this case, my cards were on the table and Thomas was waiting for a better hand. How ungrateful. How did I even get to this place in my head. All of this scrambles across my mind while looking at all of the waiters who offer me water. And even as they sidestep their way around this uneasy situation, they have no qualms about telling you to have a nice day. Yeah, I’ll try to have a nice day. I might go and get a manicure since this glass of water you have offered has been so surprisingly helpful.

I couldn’t remember the last ‘nice’ day I’d had. And that day, exposed as I was in front of the looking glass, would, in all likelihood, officially turn out to be the worst. I was 100%  distressed, and that angst stared back at me with obvious intensity. I did not recall looking or feeling like this, ever. I did not know it was possible to feel like this. My hair had not been washed in days. Under normal circumstances, the mere notion of greasy strands hanging in my face would utterly repulse me, but normal had long lost its meaning for me. My skin had not seen the sun in weeks and reflected a pasty, sickly whiteness. To those who knew me, it was all too obvious that I had eaten only occasionally in the last few months—just barely enough to keep surviving. Inside my head I could here them saying, “A walking tragedy, that one.” I pressed my middle fingers into my eyebrows, squeezing out the first tears for the evening. It had become a nightly routine to cry my eyes out in the bathroom by myself. This time, however, the depth of misery and pain had reached a truly unprecedented level. And the worst part of the agonizing moment, there was no one to turn to and no one to receive consolation from—not even God. Mind you, I could hardly blame him for abandoning me in my moment of need. Given my distinct ‘off-air’ status the previous few years, his desertion was more than a reasonable response. Drowning in that cell of solitary confinement, calling on a higher power seemed pointless, but then again, what were my alternatives? Maybe I should just give it a shot, I reasoned. After all, what did I have to lose? 

“Please,” I whispered to the mirror.

“Help.” 

I spoke louder and with more meaning, pausing between every word.

“I promise. If you help me right now in this moment -- I will never ask for anything again.” And if I’d been granted my request, I truly wouldn’t have. As long as I lived, I believed this was the most pain I would experience. I would never have a need to ask for help as desperately as I did in this moment. I inhaled a long, deep breath. You know it’s going to be a shit day when you’re talking to God in the bathroom at two o’clock in the morning.

“Okay,” I surrendered. “I’ll be all right.”

Unfortunately, I was all talk and no action. I couldn’t transform that statement into reality. In fact, I couldn’t even pull myself together, not even for ten seconds. The tears that had begun slipping through now flowed unchecked and streamed down my cheeks. It stunned me that any actually remained after sixteen consecutive months of weeping on a regular basis. I didn’t fight the outward show of despondency. The sobs that escaped me were a scary, ugly cry, the likes of which, thankfully, I will only hear a few times in my life. Today, the day I find out that my parents die, and maybe another unforeseen catastrophe that will take me a year to recover from. And believe me, my ugly cry is so much worse than Oprah’s. I think it would actually warrant an entire segment. I’ve sat through two of Oprah’s shows in Chicago and Washington D.C., and left the first show being very certain that I was significantly more interesting than Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen. Skinny twins, who talked about what they ate and who they admired. Very compelling. Move over Mary-Kate and Ashley, my ugly cry would really get the crowd’s attention.

It had been less than twenty minutes since Tom and I decided to split and the gutting loss completely overwhelmed me. Until that very moment, I had been naively unaware that such a visceral level of agony even existed. This was the sound of letting go and only half an hour into it, it was beyond torturous.

I kept staring at the mirror, and as my face contorted in agony I suddenly became horrified at my abject condition. This is so very far from who I am. This version of myself has to go. I need to know how I ever allowed my rock solid core to be weakened by anything outside of it. I will spend years finding that out, but I just can't start today. What I stared at represented souvenirs of a low-level depression; a clearly defined ribcage, a mind capable of generating only the most basic of thoughts, a face devoid of any type of expression, bloodshot eyes. In essence I had spiralled into a woman with no purpose, one whose hands found safety only in embracing the opposite shoulder.

Souvenirs. 

Those hideous physical and psychological manifestations were what remained left over from my journey to depression and back. It had been a long trip, longer than I had anticipated. And when my love for Tom began, it certainly had not been my original destination. In fact, it struck me that I should check the map and see exactly when it was that I had started to veer so horrendously off course.

 “What good will that do?” I exhaled. Who was I kidding? I was beyond exhausted. There was no way I could analyze the situation right then.

All I knew in that moment was that I’d arrived at a place called unmitigated fucking emptiness, and I was just not capable of finding my way out, or even putting one foot in front of the other. Indeed, the only thing I was capable of was lying in the fetal position and clearing the nasal pathways required to draw breath. It’s quite a shock to realize that formally, such a capable and dynamic human being can be reduced to the fetal position and barely breathing. The incandescent glow of the lights, which I’d purposely left on, led to an unusual obsession with my feet. As I stepped slowly back down the cavernous wooden hallway, gliding past moving boxes that were due to be unpacked through the week as time permitted, I became fixated on my foundations. Head down, I kept analyzing where my brain and its motor skills were planting my feet.

Baby steps. That’s what it will be like for a while.

In an obsessively compulsive way, I thought, If I can manage to avoid the cracks in the floor, I might feel better somehow. It might work. I’ll just try to distract myself for a few minutes anyway playing games with the floorboards. It’s just me and the planks of wood. Just me and the cracks in the floor. Imagine the work that went into these floors being laid down, one by one. Next to each other, in perfect alignment. So many hours went into this. I wonder how many men worked on this; I wonder what their names are, where they live, whether they had equally nice floorboards in their own home, what they are doing now. I wonder if they care that I wear my high heels on them. Like my mom did when we had the parquetry redone at our family home. She was so paranoid about her three girls marking the floor before it set that for two days; we had to climb a ladder to get to the second floor. It was a hysterical game to us, but for Mom, who designed and built such a stunning home that was deeply admired by all except for Dad, it was a deadly serious strategy. These are things we love her for. And I miss her now, I think she could just be sitting I the room and that is all I would need from her to make me feel better. She never really had the right words, but she never needed them because the warmth she could generate from her heart was so healing. I’ve never told her that, but she should know. She is the most incredible person I knew. This is where I am, distracting myself with thoughts about Mom and planks of wood. That’s OK. It really is OK. Baby steps. Mom would agree.

“We just fucking moved in here!” I yelled at the front door. I slumped back on the bed and stared at his side of the wardrobe. With every ounce of my being I wished it was just a rack of clothes, but everything had background—everything.

His favorite bright azure business shirt, which I had bought for him in Miami, caught my eye. It had taken me months to convince him that that particular shade of blue suited him best. The victory had been a small one, but also one I had thoroughly enjoyed, because I knew I was right. I had to employ Napoleon type tactics to win this battle, and when I saw him reaching for it for the first time, I had to contain my ecstatic facial expression to a gentle, thoughtful nod. It was torture. My attention shifted to those foul running shoes, the same ones I had made several unsuccessful attempts at throwing out. He had caught me red-handed each time in my covert efforts to get rid of them. How he knew, I’ll never know. I could chalk it up only to X-ray vision through the trash bag. From there, my focus landed on my favorite pink tie, the one only I had been permitted to tie. And then of course, my vision stopped at my most recent purchase for him, a new belt for Christmas. Sure, it was only a belt, but it had been the best belt in the department store and I had gone to extraordinary lengths to hide it from him for the almost two months between its purchase date and the holiday. It was one of those sacred stories that I was thrilled to tell him about when I FINALLY presented it to him near the Christmas tree. I have never done that for someone, gone to such lengths to hide something special. And no one had done it for me either. I always felt so envious of couples that cared enough about someone to present them with things that had so much meaning. I would die for the beautiful dress ring that I saw in Boone and Sons in Washington, D.C, the one I salivated over for months every morning as I walked past the store to go to work. I would try not to stare at it every day as I passed, though each day over the course of a year I edged closer and closer to the glass. I could not believe it never sold in that whole time. It was beyond stunning. I felt silly though, going in there with my single girl status buying myself a piece of jewelry, especially an antique diamond dress ring. I may as well have been carrying a sign under me arm that read, 'Hey everyone, I've been single for a few years now and feeling like it might not happen, so I'm just going to start trying a few things on.' Seriously, what girl truly means it when she resorts to buying her own ring and remarking on how awesome it makes her feel? Give it a rest, girlfriend. We’re onto you. No one would say so, but you know the assistants have a field day when you leave. ‘She doesn’t have anyone to buy it for her.’ 

In any case, for someone who grew up on the flashy beachside strip of South Beach, being picked up from the airport will do. I’ve taken more than 300 flights in the past ten years, and all I ever wanted was to sit next to someone I love, or have him pick me up from the airport. Because traveling alone does not have the appeal it did when I was 25. And because now, the destination means as much to me as the journey. No matter how amazing the trip, there’s actually nothing more I yearn for more so than the last twenty feet to my door. Inside, there’s a shower, a kitchen, and a bed that I know will make my day. I’ll disturb the cat, and she'll stretch at the same time, her paws lengthening by another 50% before the routine bound toward me. Just opening the front door will give me everything that I need in a few short but sweet seconds. Here I am, distracting myself from my reality again. That’s OK. Mom would say it’s OK. Baby steps.

Background, every item represented background. God, I hate background right now. It’s just a rack of clothes, I reminded myself, not for one second believing it.

As I looked at the clock, a million questions raced through my mind. It was exactly two o’clock Monday morning—January 6 to be exact. Despite medical assertions to the contrary, having a good memory sucks. Surely this particular date would sit in the back of my mind indefinitely, like a can of beans that’s been shoved into the dark recesses of a pantry. Though it doesn’t say so on the label, it won’t expire for years. It will just remain there, deep in the back, lost behind all the good things that see action on a regular basis. Then, one day, in 2024 perhaps, I’ll be looking for some exotic long-life ingredient for a special dinner, and there it will be, right next to the beans—just sitting there.

And it will ruin my fucking day.

For the time being, the time and date meant little to me. And they surely meant even less to others. There was no one to call, no one to lean on. And God had not gotten back to me yet. How had I wound up so alone? My reality was biting hard -- in the time we had been together, Tom had successfully managed to isolate me from my entire world. In fact, he had succeeded so resoundingly in that regard that I would have felt more at ease calling a community helpline than anyone else. Exhaustion finally allowed me an escape from reality, but it was a fleeting respite. The very second I awoke, I exploded into tears again. Have you ever exploded into tears? My face literally exploded into tears. It was almost violent. Yet another unprecedented emotional experience. The hits just keep on coming. I tried to reassure myself. To punctuate the attempt, I said it out loud. “I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m fine,” I kept repeating. I’m pretty sure that Nicole Kidman said the same thing to herself after she left Tom. Another stupid fleeting thought to distract myself. If Nic can do it, so can I. Another random thought process generated by a distressed mind desperately seeking comfort, in this particular moment, from a celebrity I never met. Totally rational. As forcefully as I uttered them, these words meant nothing. I couldn’t stop crying. Oh my god, I am so not fine, I had to admit.

My heartbeat raced at a million miles an hour, surging me further into grief, as if I could go any further. It was anxiety at its best. I dragged myself to the bathroom for more tissues. It was a bold move, but I dared myself to look in the mirror again. To television-viewing eyes, I’d likely have been considered a walking candidate for Extreme Makeover. Truth be told, however, I had been existing in this non-existent state for upwards of a year. Without my even realizing it, Tom’s depression had dragged me right down into the dregs with it. As if a tick feeding off of him, I had successfully matched his level of suffering, except I hadn’t had the luxury of being prescribed Zoloft. I hadn’t enjoyed the benefit of balancing the chemicals every day. Perhaps if I’d had, I would have been able to evict the houseguest who wouldn’t leave.

Really deep breath.

I had no idea what to do first. Maybe I should go online and find a break-up checklist, I contemplated. I should swiftly follow up that action with locating a new place to live. “Where’s the latest issue of Marie-Claire?” I ruminated. I started rummaging through an unpacked box. Surely when I unearthed it, it would contain a headline that screamed, “Top Ten Things to Do After You’ve Been Left Abandoned and Starving in an Empty House with No Money and a Career that You’ve Neglected.” As it turned out, the only list I could find in its table of contents was “Top Ten Summer Looks.” At least I could probably fit into them this year, I sarcastically reasoned.

I had to lie down again, but the sound of the front gate swinging open put that need on hold. “No! No! No! Please, be no one. I can’t face anyone,” I bantered with myself.

It was my friend Sally, whom I hadn’t seen in months. What was she doing here? In a fit of hysteria, I must have sent her a text in the middle of the night. I didn’t even remember, which was distressing in itself.

She couldn’t hide her shock over my miserable, skinny appearance. The last time Sally had seen me, I had weighed an athletic 170 pounds, and we were sharing an amazing brunch in the sun on the beach. Now here I was, standing in front of her, holding up my size two jeans at a borderline anorexic 125 pounds.

Embarrassment and humiliation overwhelmed me to such a degree that I couldn’t make eye contact with her. In testament to the kind of person Sally is, she took my hand and gently guided me to the dining room table. There, she sat both of us down.

 I still couldn’t bring myself to look at her.

“Start from the beginning,” she instructed.

“And don’t leave anything out.”

It was a cosmic love. The kind that led you to believe that, without a doubt, the stars on a clear night were shining only for you. The kind that made you feel as though your heart had been injected—Pulp Fiction style—with a concentrated shot of liquid bliss that sank deeply into every cell of your body. The kind that was so around-the-bend spectacular that other people, secretly, despised you. Now, looking at it from their perspective, free of that all-consuming rush of blood to the heart, I could hardly blame them. I must have been utterly nauseating to be around.

When Tom and I glanced at each other for the first time, the response could only be described as magic. Mutual friends had asked us both to a bar for a farewell party of some kind. I remember turning to our friend Andrew and saying, Who IS this? The chemistry was so powerful and startlingly obvious that it generated immediate comment from friends. One look at each other and we literally excused ourselves from the venue. Within mere minutes, dreamy lifelong plans were already being exchanged between us. The connection I felt toward him struck me with genuine surprise. Until that very moment, I was completely unaware that such an instant bond could exist between two people. He was so smart, so funny, and just drop dead gorgeous to look at. We sat at a bar for hours that night and tried to out-impress one another with things we’d seen and places that were on our ‘to do’ list.

Walking away from him toward the hotel was like a physics experiment gone wrong. As if made of magnetic properties, my heart felt as though it were being dragged away from its center of gravity. Each step became more challenging as I continued glancing behind me to see him standing on the corner. I could hardly sleep that night as a thousand potential scenarios ran through my mind, all involving a new, exciting life.

The morning after we met, I sat in my car by myself, lost in thought as I drove an hour west of the city. My destination, a weatherboard cottage I had rented on the ocean. Only a few weeks had passed since the September 11 terrorist attacks, and like the rest of the world, I felt rocked to the core in a way that I did not believe possible. From the moment the first tower was struck, I had stayed awake for almost 48 hours straight, wondering like many if I would ever feel the same sense of safety about traveling again. Just months prior, after a wedding in Connecticut, I had been safely nestled into a window seat on a 747 as it turned onto the JFK airport tarmac preparing for takeoff. I will never forget the pilot whose deep, friendly voice came over the speaker—suggesting we all take a good look at the World Trade Center towers because of the way they were shimmering in the stunning sunset before us. It truly was a sight to behold. Now, they were gone, and without being overly dramatic, I was struggling to come to terms with our new world order.

I was also angry. Just after I had finished my M.A. degree in International Strategic Studies, I had approached the deputy news director about starting a Ph.D. in Terrorism at a prestigious college. I had expressed this ambition, alongside concerns I had about the network having almost zero presence in Asia. Taking a broader regional view from the Indonesian news bureau, I felt compelled to ask what coverage plans we had that began educating our audience about the 250 million (mainly Muslim) people living a hundred miles north of a large sunburned country, especially in the wake of the East Timor unrest. Apparently we were not doing anything about it. It was disappointing to me as both a professional and a student who was reading broadly into terrorism trends worldwide.

As shocking as it was, when the Bali bombings happened, I didn’t bat an eyelid. This level of violence against a nation (Australia) who had aligned itself so closely with the U.S. was, quite frankly, not really that surprising to anyone who was paying attention to the issue. And when I heard the news that early morning, all I could think was that I was relieved I was not scheduled to work that day. I turned the television off and went back to sleep, hoping that someone in the room felt like a fucking moron for not listening to me a year beforehand.

My original intent in securing the secluded retreat had been to take some time out and think about my purpose in life, something that I could not hope to achieve while living a crazed daily life in television. In the wake of 9/11, that gentle tap of discontent had grown into a pounding hammer. Maybe being alone, for the first time in years, might bring newfound clarity about the direction of my life, I’d reasoned. Next to working in an emergency room, I think working in news is probably one of the most dynamic and exciting jobs going around. It is also utterly all consuming and exhausting. If you suffer any level of Attention Deficit Disorder, a newsroom is the place for you, my friend.

I took my first job as a reporter in a small mining town. My ‘patch’ covered a thousand square miles. There was nothing more exciting to me than jumping in and out of planes and helicopters to get the story, meeting some of the country’s most extraordinary characters along the way. Occasionally, I took a moment to gaze at the sun setting over the desert or to see it rise over some of the most extensive coastline in the world. It was a truly incredible gig, and I was hooked.

The thrill of the daily chase toward a deadline only intensified when I moved to a bigger market. I didn’t have much confidence navigating capital city stories, but I was willing to work hard to see how far I could go. I showed some initiative and took myself—uninvited of course—to CNN headquarters in Atlanta for a month, which in hindsight gave me the confidence to cover global news from Washington, D.C. in 2004.

So much had happened since I started in television, and now, with the Twin Towers in ruins, it was time to reflect, re-group, and give some thought to my next move. The fact that my mobile phone signal from the cottage clocked in at near zero only enhanced the solitude I’d been craving but was now second-guessing. It seemed the only communication my mobile carrier allowed had been confined to a single square foot of tiling in the kitchen. In fact, sending a text or making a call from any other part of the house had been rendered a near impossibility, and yet my overwhelming desire to touch base with Tom nudged me to keep trying. There I was, balancing on one foot, almost breaking bones in my contortionist efforts to make contact with the outside world—or more precisely the man who would soon become my entire world. It took just one text message to put the wheels of sought-after togetherness in motion. I accomplished it with an already established insider joke: “The UN should pass a resolution against wet bathroom towels when you get out of the shower,” I quipped. “A real challenge for the first world, he agreed.” Tom was in his car and on his way to me before I could even archive the message.

I launched up off the kitchen bench when I heard the car door slam. Nervousness shot through my veins like quicksilver. I knew who it was before I even looked, but that didn’t stop me from stealing a glance through the kitchen window. As I caught his eye, he flashed his brilliant, thousand-watt smile at me. In that split-second instant, he owned me. We shared a bewitching night. Swinging on the veranda chair, we gazed directly across the bay to the stunning skyline. I felt every moment. Every word, every glance, every laugh, and the moments of silence in between, admiring the glowing reflection of the city’s skyscrapers as they came to life on the surface of the water. Although we knew it the moment we met, that night we formally agreed to be together, with me starting a process to move in with him. I knew life was about to change dramatically. The deck of thoroughly shuffled cards that had been hovering for years above me landed and formed a perfect lineup. And I was ready.

You breathed infinity

Into my world

And time was lost up in a cloud

We dug a hole in the cool, grey earth

And lay there for the night – Missy Higgins

When I called mom the next day, I triumphantly declared, in between dropouts, that I was in love. “When you meet him, you’ll see why,” I gushed. High on life, there wasn’t a chance in the world I could disguise this magic carpet I found myself floating on. I acted accordingly. Almost overnight, I began skipping around with a grin from ear to ear, greeting colleagues at work and strangers at bus stops like a lead character in a Disney animated film (minus the costume—although if someone dared me, I would have worn it). On some days I felt that I had more positive energy running through my body than every global motivational speaker put together.

One would think that the thousand-mile distance that lay between Tom’s and my capital city homes would negatively impact the intensity of our relationship. Hardly. I welcomed the challenge. And so, every week without fail, I would scrape together hundreds of dollars I didn’t have and beg friends and my sister for rides to the airport. And for his part, my newfound obsession shared in the lengths I went to in order to spend time with each other. Tom would also make hefty sacrifices, in one case spending three times the normal amount on an airfare ticket to spend less than five hours with me.

A month of unmitigated bliss went by before my first concern arose. We were lying in bed together when it occurred to me that Tom was unable to ‘connect’ with me. Sex for him seemed to be a source of dread as opposed to an act of love. I sensed that it was emotionally painful for him. He couldn’t look at me and couldn’t wait to get out of bed. Something isn’t quite right here, my mind whispered. I had no genuine reason to be suspicious, and yet I was. It felt like my intuition had been pinched, putting me on my guard. The thought proved fleeting, though, and I let it go. I just brushed it off as me trying to sabotage my newfound partnership. I was not going to allow any doubts and insecurities to creep in and spoil this for me, I said to myself. How many times had I let myself down, and let someone go—because of assumptions that ultimately proved to be wrong?

 My mind eased, I began to pursue our togetherness in earnest. While Tom was away on a vacation he had arranged prior to meeting me, I made it my mission to transfer cities. Fueled by burning desire, I was, of course, able to accomplish that goal without too much trouble. Even when it came to leaving my high-profile job, I had no qualms. With no highly complex strategy in place, I casually strode into the executive producer’s office and declared, “I am planning to move.”

The declaration clearly caught my superior off guard. A look of trouble spread across his face. He sat down, gathered his thoughts, looked at me again, and said in the gruffest voice I’ve ever heard him use, “And why the fuck would you want to do that? That city is all fucking football and fucking politics.” He threw one more expletive at me, just in case I missed his point, “Fucking hell, Mills!”

In the event I didn’t already know it, Rob hated my new destination and his less-than-charismatic colleague who ran the show down there. Swearing every time he drew breath was standard operating procedure, so I didn’t flinch at his response. I happened to be one of the very few females he liked. As the network chief, he exhibited under-the-radar preferential treatment toward me, which had paid off in more ways than I anticipated.

For example, I was once returned from shooting a story in Vietnam to find a confidential envelope on my desk from human resources. It was confirmation of a significant pay raise. I scanned everyone in the newsroom, because I thought I was being ‘punked.’ Where was the camera crew hiding? I asked myself. I glanced to every corner of the room and scanned the chief of staff’s desk. But everyone was furiously punching the keyboard, on deadline. I double-checked the wording of the letter. I was the only reporter who was not seeking more money, yet here it was, courtesy of the man in the corner office with the minibar. It was a very generous way to approve of my work. I didn't believe I was worth it.

Rob’s encouragement and support along the way left me thinking that he was the only one I would really miss, but I wasn’t about to let a little misty-eyed professional relationship get in the way of my relocation. In fact, I was so keen on leaving that I abandoned the ‘going away’ drinks that had had been organized for me by the deputy producer and the rest of my colleagues. In hindsight, that behavior could only be described as obnoxious, but at the time, I thought nothing of it. At about 4:00 p.m. on my final day at the studio, I simply logged off my computer and quietly slid out the door.

It was an easy exit. After all, I had been planning it full time for a month. Over the course of those four weeks, I had taken my belongings home, one by one. The calculated way in which I went about my departure ensured no one really noticed, but still, the complete obliviousness rankled at me. It’s a serious reality check when you realize people you thought cared about you don’t really give a shit what you do. This was the first time it hit me—that people whom you spend virtually all day, every day of your life with for many years aren’t really the least bit concerned with what you are doing with your life. Unless it requires a trivial moment of commitment on their part, like agreeing to swap a shift with you so they can make it to their hairdresser on time, you’re a virtual non-entity to them.

That’s life I guess. The truth is, I could have wandered out of the newsroom door with a TV monitor in my hands and I doubt anyone would have noticed. Even the sweet security guard who seemed too star-struck to take his job seriously probably wouldn’t have batted an eyelash at me. That stunning realization paralyzed my ego for just a few moments. Then I built the world’s shortest bridge and got over it. As I refocused my attention on relocating, I grew desperately anxious to get home and finish packing. Of course, once I had realigned my priorities, all I could think about was Tom and getting to him.

In my head, I planned a life there, one that also included a wedding. I had a new nauseating motto, as Frank Sinatra said, I was doing things “My Way” from now on. I had been keeping other people happy for quite long enough and this was my chance to break free. Uprooting my life for Tom represented the change I had been secretly holding out for.

After a stressful and miserable few years working in a major newsroom, I’d gradually grown to feel more undervalued as the days passed. Besides the odd exceptions (a surprise pay raise, a wardrobe allowance), I found the newsroom to be a nasty and toxic place that allowed little room for true personal growth thanks to the lack of role models or mentors. A few years later, I was deeply saddened when I heard that a gorgeous and talented young girl had taken her own life an hour before the broadcast. It rocked anyone who had ever worked in that newsroom. I was gutted for a few colleagues who I knew were very close to her. In addition to suffering depression, she had endured subtle and relentless bullying from other female anchors who thought nothing of destroying the self-esteem of the ‘competition’ so they could hold on to their fleeting and non-meaningful on-air status. If they knew that she struggled with depression and was taking a new medication, I wonder if they would have backed off. I wonder if they could have demonstrated some kind acts of inclusiveness. 

They bullied others as well, including me, even though I had no intention of moving from the production desk to the news desk. They made comments about my weight, were brutally condescending, and were constantly looking for ways to assert what little power they believed they had. (I knew this wasn't in my head because one key anchor took me aside and acknowledged it.) You would think by the way a few of them paraded around that they were up for an annual Nobel. The reality was quite the opposite. For two in particular, the only envelopes they were opening were to cocktail parties. Not exactly a lifestyle to be jealous of.

One young woman who was anchoring the morning news show used to call her husband, on average, about twice each morning so he could help her pronounce certain names and locations correctly. She would cover the phone with her hand, thinking that even though we were only three feet apart, it would stop me (and five other producers) from hearing what she was asking. Newsflash, princess: we can all hear you on the phone to your husband asking for backup. We are the people you should be relying on. Until now, this team of producers and myself thought we were a 'team.' Her simple lack of talent was rescued daily by her ‘good looks’ and her ability to read an autocue. I often thought how fast she would be exposed if she were anchoring for CNN or a network that relied on developing news to fill airtime.

I had the privilege of sitting in a CNN control room in Atlanta when NATO was starting its bombing campaign on Yugoslavia. The producers and anchors handled the incoming news like a NASA aircrew, seamlessly navigating a sudden change of course in the cockpit. It was a joy to watch. Looking at the anchors in my newsroom, there was probably only one person who could handle breaking news on the spot. And he worked in sports. If only he was around the moment 9/11 happened, that would have been helpful.

I was just getting into bed when the chief of staff called. I will never as long as I live forget how I physically shook as I flew into the newsroom, calling my sisters and ordering them to “turn the television on.” I remember Sarah being angry at me for waking her up—JUST DO IT, I yelled. I knew it was just a matter of time until I witnessed another exercise in embarrassing incompetency. I walked into a dark newsroom. The only light was on the set, where the late news anchor sat, struggling to make any sense whatsoever of the story, which was fair enough. It was overwhelming.

I turned to the deputy producer and said, “We need to switch to the CNN coverage—that’s why we pay them a million dollars a year.” Apparently we were not going to. Our audience was to continue being exposed to the anchor’s very average ad-libbing skills. “Then we need to call in three more anchors to get them in make-up, because the person on set now will be exhausted in an hour and we’ll need to rotate them around.”

He promptly ignored me and asked me to start logging pictures for the lead 6:00 p.m. news story. It was midnight—eighteen hours before the 6:00 p.m. news. “Don’t you think the story could change between now and then?” I asked, sounding like that was the single most ridiculous request anyone with any news sense could make.

My days in the newsroom were not only peppered with scenes of epic intellectual failings but also gut-wrenching and unnecessary confrontations. I recall being the victim of a furious tirade after one newscast, when one irrational, beyond arrogant anchor accused me of deliberately shifting around elements of the rundown, just to cause her stress, while we were live to air. I did no such thing; in fact, it’s virtually impossible to mess with a rundown even if you wanted to. There are so many factors that go into making each story get to air. This attack, incidentally, came from a woman who was so busy having sex with a married cameraman that her hair and make-up had to be completely re-done seconds before going live to air. She abused me in front of our colleagues with such intensity that all I could do was sit in my car behind the studio and cry all afternoon. 

My only consolation was that she had just ‘outed’ her volcanic temperament in front of the entire newsroom. Everyone already knew that she was having a full-throttle affair with a workmate. Now on top of that, she appeared as though she needed to be checked into an anger management retreat for unstable women. Go fuck yourself, I said to myself as I left the building. Nice. I was so far from the person I wanted to be. Tom was mortified at how a regular day played out for me in the newsroom. He thought most colleagues were lawsuits waiting to happen.

Weeks later another semi-traumatizing incident occurred. I was asked to go out onto a story, and of course I was not prepared because I was due to work on a production shift that day. With no appropriate make-up or clothes, I legged it down to wardrobe for help. I was under the impression that’s what they were there for. Apparently not! One of the girls stepped out from behind a rack of clothes and I asked her if she had a jacket I could borrow for the afternoon. She proceeded to look me up and down from head to toe, assessing my body, before she bluntly replied, “We don’t have anything that will fit you.” She then stepped back behind the rack of clothes.

“You don’t have anything that will fit me?” I said, scanning the thousand suits filling the room. I looked at my watch, I had forty-five minutes to be ready for my first live cross at a train station that, on a good day in traffic, I estimated would be a thirty-minute trip. I was standing three floors down from the newsroom with no make-up on or hair done, and I had nothing to wear. My name was in the rundown to talk about a thousand commuters left stranded by a train line that had been shut down. I had to arrive, assess the situation, interview at least four passengers, and THEN figure out what I was going to say. Ideally, I would have liked two hours to prepare. I had less than half that and I also had a total bitch to contend with, one who clearly had no fucking clue as to what her job was. She also had no idea that how I looked on air was a reflection on her, being part of the wardrobe department.

“If I look bad, YOU look bad, do you understand?” I said, storming out. I was fucking furious (in addition to feeling high anxiety about doing this pending live cross) and I wasn’t prepared to hide it. I proceeded to report the incident to the program director on the way out the door. Years later, I would realize my coworker did the same thing to other reporters, repeatedly. Even to this day, she’s still doing it.

A rational human being would think that after a young anchor committed suicide it would force some kind of self-examination. Apparently not. Apparently there were still employees this woman felt it was totally fine to continue undermining. Apparently she had no qualms whatsoever about destroying the lives of many well-meaning colleagues who really cared about what they did and how they delivered information to the public. In my humble opinion, it wasn’t a game, it wasn’t about being difficult, it was just about looking the best we could look and feeling confident about what we were saying.

I didn’t sign up for this trivial newsroom warfare, but I tried to fit in, coping the best I could with the unfair discrimination, the daily judgment, and the overt power playing. In a desperate effort to build a foundation of some sort, I bought an apartment in the city. Just weeks later when I met Tom, it became instantly clear a ritzy apartment in the city couldn’t provide anywhere near the same sort of purpose to my life he could. I also knew I could not sustain this workplace any longer.

So to put it mildly, I was relieved and thrilled to be leaving my life there behind. As I fastened my seatbelt and headed east, I savored the open road that lay before me. Cranking the music up loud, I sang out loud, hitting notes like the worst runner-up in the first round of an American Idol audition. I didn’t care. I felt as though I was going to burst in the happiness I had finally found. It was September 2001 and I was in a rush.

Call me nosy, but I happen to think scars are interesting. Because they normally tend to be lingering evidence of innocent childhood activities gone—sometimes hysterically—wrong. I never harbor any hesitation in interrogating people about them. At the same time, I have no qualms boring people about the multitude of accidents that mortified my parents and left me with five major cuts on my body before I turned 10.

The hits kept on coming. The latest incident happened when I was 30, leaving me with a major scar running down my left elbow. After falling out of a Washington, D.C. bar and across a very inconveniently placed ‘half-step,’ I smashed my elbow into several different fragments. My entire body landed on my elbow joint. At first I courageously stood up in my three-inch heels and declared to my two male friends, “We have dinner reservations at seven o’clock, carry on team!” Approximately three minutes later, the adrenaline wore off. Reality kicked in. Hard. One surgery and two entire years of rehabilitation later, my arm had full range of motion. When I hear people whining about hurting their toe, or something similarly insignificant, I resist the urge to roll up my sleeve and show them my scar, to give their ‘pain’ some perspective. It’s probably one of the most expensive scars in the neighborhood, costing roughly $45,000 when all was said and done. It also cost me many freelance jobs and my relationship at the time.

The fun didn’t stop there. As if all this wasn’t enough, it severely hurt my capacity to report for a major network. The number of times I went live into the morning national news bulletin, barely able to pull a headline together, is very unfortunately documented in the news library. I looked and felt the absolute worst I had in my entire life. No one inquired about my rehab schedule so no one actually knew that I was taking high-grade painkillers every morning that had a completely debilitating impact on my body and my brain. I think my career has yet to recover from that embarrassing period of well-below-par performances.

No one tells you what chronic pain does to your life. (In case you are wondering, it comprehensively fucks with it all day, every day.) You can’t sleep, eat, exercise, drive a car, have sex, socialize, or travel the way you normally can. When you are breaking your joint back slowly through scar tissue over the course of two years, it’s difficult to enjoy anything, except a walk to the local pharmacy to refill prescriptions for pain medication, refusing lucrative offers from drug dealers on the way out. When you are taking painkillers so strong that you routinely vomit, it’s hard to find any degree of happiness in anything. When you get home from the hospital after surgery that was so painful you think it would have been easier to die, there are few things that can make you feel better. It’s the only moment in my life where—if the nurse had offered me quick, painless death in addition to intravenous morphine—I would have taken it. The post surgery pain was that intense.

Lying in a hospital bed, I was yet to fully feel the gravity of this slip and fall. I couldn’t open a door or do my own hair for a year, life was beyond shit, and I was suffering in ways I did not know existed. And that was just in relation to navigating the U.S. health system. Only a few years on can I laugh about those moments at LAX, when I would be lugging my suitcase around with one arm in a sling. People would say, “Are you okay with that?” I mean seriously, Do I look okay? Or coming out of Whole Foods, waiting for someone to open a door, only to have one man say, “Where’s your husband when you need him?” I had well and truly lost my sense of humor by the third trip to Whole Foods in the summer humidity.

This was my most painful scar. Tom’s scars were different.

A major imperfection ran down the base of his back. Initially, when I had probed him about it, he claimed it was the result of a motorbike accident. Just like most young men who consider themselves invincible, he had an obsession with his two-wheeled suicide machine. Reinforcing his story, Tom’s mother Jacky had told me that he was lucky to be alive. I had no reason to believe otherwise, especially after hearing the two of them relate the terrifying details: Tom had accidentally launched himself off his bike and literally slid across one of the city’s busiest intersections on his knees. It just so happened that that crossroad included two sets of train tracks. Lucky, I marveled, was an understatement. I was pleased that Tom had the good sense to sell his motorbike shortly after that incident, so I didn’t have to launch a personal grassroots campaign, complete with loud protests, to convince him to give it up.

I had, of course, met Jacky and Bill before moving in with Tom, who lived with his mother and stepfather while he finished up his law degree. The day I pulled into the driveway of the home they shared with him, they had both greeted me with open arms, a warm and welcoming gesture I very much appreciated. A doting mother, Jacky was incredibly proud of Tom, and why wouldn’t she be? Her son held the unspoken title as the youngest and brightest lawyer in the country, one who had the professional advantage of being mentored by the most respected lawyer in the business. His name was David, and he was a fascinating and friendly person, who hosted equally fascinating parties frequented by smart, unpretentious overachievers in a variety of fields. These parties turned out to be a playground for Tom and me, offering a chance to mingle with the best and brightest.

An intellectual genius, Tom could charm the pants off people who were forty years his senior. When we walked into high-brow political parties together, he instantly owned the room. In fact, he enjoyed nothing more than outsmarting the smartest man he could find.

On one particular occasion, the target of his superiority game play was a former high-profile administration official. If conversation were a sport, Tom took it to an Olympic level. He routinely knocked out his opponents with one effortless uppercut and left them exiting through a side door with a disappointing silver medal hanging around their neck. It was a charm offensive like none other I had ever been a part of. It mattered not that I usually left feeling equally embarrassed, powerless to contribute anything of sparring value to these high-level talks about government, art, and culture. Sometimes I told people I was a waitress so I didn’t have to follow up with anything of interest. I still enjoyed this window into a world I would not otherwise have known.

Every time we left David’s home, which was never earlier than 3:00 a.m., Tom and I would race each other to the car in the freezing cold, giddy at having had the opportunity to widen our social circle and secure such a unique bond with David and his wife. It was a tremendous professional and personal privilege for Tom to have David in his corner, and everyone knew so. In fact, I knew it was a source of jealousy between Tom’s friends and young law colleagues, who were at an automatic disadvantage without such a professional guardian angel.

I was living on the top floor of her home, so it was fortunate that I automatically adored Jacky, despite thinking that she overindulged Tom. That seemed to be a perfectly natural response to having just one child, I rationalized. Jacky was simply over-compensating for the loss of Tom’s father, who had died of cancer when he was only five, I reasoned. I made a huge effort with her, routinely taking her out to lunch and filling her in on the gaps of information that Tom would never offer up. She jumped at every chance to spend time with me, because it enabled her to be more involved in Tom’s life than ever before. She genuinely lapped up every detail I had for her, which I was more than happy to provide, though her enthusiasm seemed a bit ridiculous at times. She seemed far too desperate to know what was really happening, an indication that she was, in truth, quite disconnected from Tom’s life.

I was soon to learn that Tom and Jacky had a volatile relationship at best, with Tom resentfully storming out of Thanksgiving lunches, Easter dinners, and any other special night he could sabotage. Apologies were hard to come by for days following such incidents.  It was appalling, truly insolent behavior that I had little chance of correcting. The worst episode was one Christmas dinner. Out of nowhere, Tom ambushed Jacky with what seemed to be a completely unwarranted accusation about something. I think it was his way of yelling, “Fuck you—I won’t sit here with my knife and fork and pretend to play happy families.”

Yeah, we heard you. We get it. You’re angry. You’re mad. And you feel entitled to be the master of destruction on nights that are meant to be quiet, respected, and treasured. Bill knew exactly why Tom would act out, as did I. The 800-pound gorilla in the room was slumped across the table, with one foot on my dinner plate. And he stank. I wanted to carve him up and boil him, I didn’t give a shit of how endangered he was in Rwanda.

Jacky was overwrought with anguish every time Tom threw a spanner into her special nights. She was baffled as to why he would do this, with a private school education and all. While shockingly, Tom seemed to delight in the drama. He genuinely got a kick out of comprehensively fucking up Jacky’s evening, not to mention the extraordinary effort she put into a three-course meal. It was alarming to see him behave like this and then escort me upstairs with zero remorse. He never felt the obligation to call the next day and apologize.

It was quite transparent—Tom had a deep-seated rage for Jacky, indirectly allowing him to be abused, and he wasn’t going to let her get away with it. He wasn’t going to ever inform her either. So it was there that he abandoned her, in between self-destruction and self-emulation. And about a thousand miles from the truth. Nice one, Tom, another dinner ruined. Thank you for not only sending Jacky into a state of distress but also buggering up everyone else’s night and sending us upstairs early, knowing that we were in for a string of awkward conversations followed by an even more awkward silence. Happy days.

Jacky is a good person, mind you. She just doesn’t know what’s going on in her own house. Bill, on the other hand, as much as I tried to see the good in him, seemed a little off kilter to me from the get-go. A tall man with a beard, he had a troubled relationship with his daughter, whose name also just happened to be Antonia. He struggled with this contentious association. I suspected she had cut off all contact for a good reason, but one I would never be fully informed of.

I had no doubt that Bill loved Jacky, but I couldn’t help feeling as though she was more of a housekeeper than a true partner. (Always flustered over keeping a domestic order, she never failed to have a hearty meal on the table for the four of us despite working full time.) For her part, Jacky had just wanted a father figure for Tom, so an outside observer like me could easily deem it a marriage of convenience that somehow worked.

The household was mostly happy, mind you, but a clear-cut fakeness underlined it. Growing up with parents who routinely pretended to be in love for the sake of their impressionable audience of three young daughters, I could sniff out this lack of authenticity from a mile away. Try as I might to ignore it, my gut told me Bill was a fraud. In just a few days’ time, I would find out that niggling inclination had been right on the mark.

We were upstairs with the door closed and the sun had not yet gone down on the day as Tom threw back an entire bottle of red wine. In ten minutes flat, he had drained its burgundy contents. Swallowing the last drops, he closed his eyes and shook his head as if in a trance. Just one look at the dramatic gesticulation and I knew he was psyching himself up for something. Granted, I knew next to nothing about sports or wrestling, but the way he positioned himself on the bed struck a chord of familiarity in me, as though he were arranging himself in a starting defensive position of some sort. Strange, given that I certainly held no intention of tackling him to the ground. That’s when he let loose with the verbal confession that still doesn’t seem real.

I sat in front of Tom, stunned into immobility at the extremely disturbing personal monologue he delivered. I knew it had to be torture for him. The fact that he had had to achieve borderline drunkenness to discuss it with me didn’t bother me once the full gravity of what he was saying sunk in. The facts were as follows, and he punched them out slowly, but like a prosecuting attorney rolling off a list of criminal charges before a courtroom of jurors.

1. He suffered from depression, for which he took huge doses of Zoloft every day.

Okay, I thought. I have never been exposed to depression but I am sure I can be supportive. As long as you keep taking your medication, we can manage. I know I am a smart girl; I can do whatever needs to be done here. We’re fine so far.

2. The depression had been triggered by sexual abuse—and there had been more than one offender. What? Oh my god. Someone hurt you—people hurt you? More than ONE person hurt you? What did they do? When did they do this? Who did you tell? This could be the worst thing I have ever heard. My mind is in complete overdrive. But don’t say anything, he doesn’t want you to say anything. Fight instinct to ask questions and just listen for once. I want to grab him and scream.

3. He had been sexually abused by a friend of the family, someone who had been tasked with looking after him while his single, widowed mother worked two jobs so she could afford to send him to private school.

I thought my heart was just going to stop beating.

A friend of the family? A caretaker? Someone your mother actually trusted with your welfare? Don’t judge, don’t ask questions, just listen. I feel sick. This cannot get worse.

But in fact, the shock factor was about to go off the Richter scale.

4. He had also been physically abused by his step-father. The very same man whose house I was living in. I was stunned. Everything I knew about Tom was unraveling before me. With just a few sentences, my truth was being proven untrue. My mind was able to start connecting the dots and I took a loud breath as the reality sank in: The scars on his back were not from falling off his motorcycle, as he had previously claimed. They had been caused by his step-father, the result of being repeatedly thrown against the brick wall in the kitchen, starting from the time Tom was ten years old. A grown man. Bashing a child against a wall.

My heart started to beat louder. Who does that? Is that even possible? How can that happen without anyone knowing, without anyone caring? Who rescued you at the time? How did he force you to stay quiet? Did he threaten to kill you? How do you even look him in the eye? Most importantly, how did this happen without the offender being held accountable? Child abuse is a crime. It’s a crime. This man should be in prison. Didn’t anyone help you? Anyone?

5. And finally, the kicker—no one else knew. Not even Tom’s own mother. Jacky knew nothing. You cannot be serious. I won’t ever be the same again after hearing you say these things out loud to me. I am starting to feel your pain and it is overwhelming. There are no words that could ever make up for what you have been through. All on your own. There was no one.

All that time, every single day after school and every Saturday morning on the way to the market, when they had spent private alone time together, Tom had hidden everything from Jacky. The rationale behind his silence had been an utterly selfless one. He simply hadn’t wanted his mother to lose another husband. Tom wanted his mom to have a stable partner, even if he was the wrong partner. And so, Jacky came home every night from work to what she thought was the perfect family. Behind the scenes, however, the reality was a violent and horrifying one.

How Tom managed to exist all those long decades while harboring such hideous secrets and lies was beyond me. The whole scenario sickened me. Moreover, I had to admit I was scared. Sure, I was glad Tom finally trusted me enough to admit the truth, but an undercurrent of terror still shot through me. That’s because I knew deep down that Tom’s baggage would have a yet-to-be-determined impact on our relationship. Every plan in my mind about our future was instantly wiped clean. Could I stay through this? Could I live a lie, as Tom was? If I was to proceed, could I turn a blind eye to Bill’s abuse? Could I let him anywhere near our children when the time came?

As far as Jacky was concerned, Tom’s depression had been triggered by an ex-girlfriend who had dumped him out of left field. She had come home one night to find Tom curled up in the fetal position on the kitchen floor, catatonic. Something in his brain had snapped. That chemically induced meltdown had left him on the starting line of mental illness.

At the end of his distressing speech, all Tom wanted to know was if I still loved him. Of course I did, but I had no words of comfort to extend to him, and he didn’t want any. In fact, I wasn’t even allowed to ask any questions. Questions, he said, ‘were not for girls.’ That was fine by me, for now. We lay on the bed for a while, jointly staring at the empty wine bottle. It was the most awkward moment I had ever shared with someone whom I was in love with. Never had I been lost for words.

After a while, Tom went into his office and came back with a printout. Verbally paralyzed, he had written down the words he still felt a desperate need to convey.

I love you. I was trying to tell you my story each and every evening before tonight, but it took a while to emerge. I can’t say exactly where the urge to convey it came from, but I can say it was an unquenchable desire. I thought I owed it to you, in a strange way, a complete surrender to more fully drink you in. In this way, ‘love’ is equally disabling as it is enabling. Thank you. I felt completely at ease talking it over with you, sweetheart. It is easy to judge people (even when you’re close to them), and I thank you for freeing me from preconceptions and irrelevancies in the way you did. I had to tell you because to omit such details would, I think, in itself be a method of deception, even though it wouldn’t affect day-to-day happenings. It is, however, unfortunately, part of me—and a part of my life. It has made me eminently stronger than I would have otherwise been, and in some ways, I am glad. In many more obvious ways, I would love to un-learn some of those base lessons. No matter how good you are at mental gymnastics, these things can’t be un-learned.

I took the deepest breath on personal record.

I am unreservedly in love with you. Sometimes, when you smile, I can detect a physical reaction on my part. I can actually feel it in the center of my chest. Amazing. These feelings bring with them so much trepidation. It has been my experience that those closest to us do the most pointed and long-lasting damage. It is a consideration, but not a fear of mine. I am willing to risk the visceral pain for the essence of exhilaration you provide me. I know how lucky I am to have found you, and I will not intentionally fail you—ever. I love you always, and in all ways.

Deeply saddened and utterly defeated by the evening, I excused myself without voicing a word to Tom. I sat on the top of the staircase for a few minutes, trying to process the myriad criminal acts that had just been dumped at the doorstep of my life. I then went downstairs to wash out Tom’s empty wine glass, desperately trying to think of what I had on the work agenda for the next day.

I made my way at a glacial pace down the stairs. I was mentally searching for anything to take my focus off the disturbing visions that ran like a horror movie through my mind. Bill and Jacky were watching television downstairs so I knew that before I stepped into the kitchen, I had to come to terms with the fact that my reality had been shattered. I was now living in a house with an emotionally crippled boyfriend, a violent child abuser, and a woman whose motherly instincts failed to sense any hint of distress whatsoever in her own household. How could you love someone without your instinct telling you that something was completely out of order? How could you be so out of touch? Was I being fair even thinking that?

I was equally enraged with Jacky as I was with Bill. After all, I had moved interstate into a new job, was faced with making a new circle of friends, all under the impression that there was not an underlying secret that Tom knew would potentially be more than what I was ready to cope with. Note to self, Thomas: if you’re harboring a devastating secret that directly impacts your ability to maintain a relationship with a primary partner, it’s your responsibility to put it on the table so your partner can make a better informed choice about which way she wants her life to go. Now that I’m here, what am I supposed to do? If you’re going to roll out this kind of information, at least give me the chance to ask a question, so I feel like I actually have some sliver of control over my own life. ‘Questions are not for girls’—you are kidding yourself, Tom. It’s what we do for a living.

When I reached the bottom step, I found Jacky watching television in the living room. She asked me if everything was all right.

I didn’t hear her the first time.

I was absorbed in thought.

I was staring at the brick wall.