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“You’re going to think I’m an idiot.”
“No,” I promise. “I won’t.”
With reluctance she says, “Declan called yesterday. He asked me to meet him at our old condo after work. He was crying on the phone. I can’t remember the last time I heard him cry. He’s always so stoic. I asked him what was wrong and he begged me to come home, to come back to him. He said he was sorry, that he couldn’t live without me, that he was getting help and would never hurt me again, would never cheat on me again. He promised, on his life, he said.”
“And so you went home to him?” I ask. “And he did this?”
“It’s my fault,” she says. “I should have known better. I upset him.” I hate that she would think she was to blame for this kind of abuse, though I know it’s normal for victims of domestic violence to think this because it’s what their abuser wants them to think—that they did something so egregious as to deserve physical punishment.
“How is it your fault, Nat?” I ask. “He’s the one who hurt you. He did this.”
“When he called,” she says, “he said he wanted another chance and I said okay because, to be honest, I love and miss him too. I believed him when he said he would never hurt me again, because he sounded so broken down and gutted on the phone. I’d never heard him sound like that. He left work early, which he never does. He brought home flowers and takeout and at first everything was fine. No,” she says, thinking back in an almost nostalgic way, a sad smile playing on her lips, turning the swollen one even more deformed, “it was better than fine. It was just like the old times. He was the Declan he used to be, when I first met him. Loving, funny and sweet. He started a fire and I opened a bottle of wine, and we ate dinner on a blanket on the living room floor in front of the fire. It was romantic. We talked for hours, we laughed. We made love,” she says, pausing there, reminiscing. “He was so tender, so attentive. He took his time. When we were done, we lay there holding one another, and he said he’d been thinking about us starting a family, and how he wanted more than anything to have a baby with me.”
Suddenly she sobers, any vestiges of wistful memories disappearing. “But I knew I couldn’t do that, not with the way he sometimes is. I brought up what he said about getting help. I asked about the therapist and how it was going, and that’s when he told me that he wasn’t actually seeing a therapist, that he’d thought about it but decided that it wasn’t something he needed to do after all. He could control his temper himself.” She pauses for breath and to collect herself, and then goes on, “I should have known better. I shouldn’t have said anything. I shouldn’t have second-guessed him.”
“What did you say?”
“I asked him if he really thought that was a good idea, and wasn’t it worth seeing a therapist at least once before making the decision not to go.”
“It’s a smart question, Nat,” I say gently. “It wasn’t wrong of you to ask.”
“Yeah, well, apparently it was, because the mood in the room suddenly changed. He stood up and threw what was left of his dinner at me, and then he screamed, Why do you always have to go and ruin everything? We were having a perfectly good night and then you went and fucked it all up again. You’re so fucking stupid, Nat. You couldn’t just keep your dumb mouth closed. He hit me,” she says, her fingers brushing against her lip before moving to her cheek. Tears prick my eyes and I force them back. That someone could speak to her—to anyone—like this makes me sick. She takes a breath, holds it and then slowly exhales.
“He’s not wrong, you know? I should have known better than to bring it up. If I would have just gone with the flow, if I could have just enjoyed our time together and not questioned him or dredged up sensitive topics, he wouldn’t have gotten so upset.”
“Nat,” I say. “It’s not your fault. Where are you staying now? Do you have your own apartment?”
She shakes her head. “No. With a friend and her husband,” she says. “They have an extra room. I’ve been with them for a few weeks.”
I think back to what Nat told me at the restaurant the other night, how no one believes her when she tells them about Declan because they find him to be so charming. To quote her words, they think he’s the perfect guy.
“What did she say when she saw your face?” I ask.
Nat turns shy. It takes a second for her to reply and when she does, she says, “I lied to her. I couldn’t tell her that Declan did this, so I told her I slipped and fell down the stairs on my way to catch the L. She believed me.” Some L stations are elevated and others are underground, with steep, concrete steps and poor lighting. It wouldn’t be hard to think that someone could lose their footing on the unforgiving stairs and fall and, if they did, the end result might look something like this: a bruised cheek, a swollen lip.
The similarity to my former patient, Anne, and her claim that she fell down the basement steps is upsetting. I think back to Anne and how her husband ended up killing her eventually, and how I regretted not doing more to help while she was still alive. Leaving an abusive partner is the most dangerous time for someone like Nat. I remember reading that somewhere. For men who wind up killing their spouses, the inciting incident is, most often, when a woman leaves or threatens to leave. It’s one of the reasons women stay in abusive relationships for as long as they do, because they’re afraid of what might happen if they leave.
“What about people at work? Do they think the same thing? That you fell?”
“I didn’t go to work. I called in sick because I didn’t want my students seeing me like this. They would have been afraid. I went to the museum instead. I just walked around all day alone, looking at things, wondering how my life ended up like this.”
“You can’t go back to him, Nat. Ever. No matter what he says, he won’t change.”
She says, “I know,” but it’s meek and I want to ask if she does—if she really does—but it’s not my place, and I don’t want to overstep and push her away because as far as I can tell, there isn’t one person in her life she can talk to about Declan except for me.
A question comes. “How did he know where to find you the other night, when we were at that restaurant?”
Her eyebrows pull together, the neon sign still emblazoning her bruised cheek. “What do you mean?” she asks, confused.
“You said he was there, watching you. How did he know where you’d be? Did you tell him?”
Her face changes. Her eyes enlarge and her jaw goes momentarily slack. Her words are slow, staccatolike when she speaks. “It was just a coincidence, I thought.”
This city is big. It’s sprawling, spanning over twenty miles north to south along the lake. There are upwards of a hundred different neighborhoods and something like three million people who live here. It’s not impossible to run into someone coincidentally, but the odds of it happening are slim.
“Maybe,” I say, “but maybe not. Have you checked your phone? Do you know if he ever installed one of those tracking apps on there?” Sienna and I have one called Life360, which lets me track her phone so I know where she is. Sienna hates that I have it, but it was one of my stipulations when she got her phone, especially with her long commute to and from school. I promised at the time that I wouldn’t use it to snoop on her and her friends, but only in case of an emergency. To be fair, I turned my location on so she too could see where I am at all times. It’s just a precaution, to keep us safe, I told her and, as always, she asked what was so bad and scary out there that we needed to be kept safe from. The list is endless.
“I don’t think so,” Nat says now, but she takes her phone out of her bag for good measure to check. “How would I know?”
