“I knew he thought he was sweeping me up in this big, romantic moment, but honestly, I was scared. It was like the connection between us had severed and he no longer understood what I wanted or how I felt. When I said no, he asked if I was breaking up with him. I said no to that, too.

“And he started crying big, fat tears like I’d never seen a man cry before. He said if he lost me, he’d go crazy. He wouldn’t know what to do. Maybe he would just kill himself now, he said, to save us both the trouble. I convinced him to stop crying, stop saying those horrible things. Told him I loved him, held him for a long time.”

Pastor Adam sucked air in through his teeth, suggesting he knew exactly what was coming next.

And so she continued. “The next day he was obscenely happy, happier than I’d ever seen him. He’d brought over takeout from our favorite Chinese place, and we sat together on the couch to eat it and watch reruns on the cable TV. On a commercial break, he turned to me and said he’d given it a lot of thought… mind you, it had been less than twenty-four hours since our altercation the night before. He’d given it lots of thought, he said, and we didn’t need a piece of paper in order to be married. We were already married in our hearts and we belonged to each other, and then he kissed me. He wouldn’t stop. He pushed farther and farther, way past anything we’d ever done before, covered my body with his, and I could feel…”

Her voice cracked. “I could feel what he had planned, and it wasn’t what I wanted. Not one bit. He kept coming at me even when I begged him to stop, and so I bit him. Hard. I bit him so hard, his lip was just spewing blood, and he called me awful names, then threw me off the couch so hard that the glass coffee table shattered from the force of me slamming into it. I ran and locked myself in the bathroom, begging him to go away.

“The next morning, my landlord stopped by, told me there had been too many complaints from the other tenants and I had until the end of the day to pack my things and move on. Alan didn’t come round that day, I have no idea why. He called and seemed fine. We made plans to meet the next day because I figured that would keep him away long enough for me to get gone without him having to know where.

“He called at midnight to say he loved me. I didn’t let him know that I had slept on a coworker’s couch, that I had tossed most of my earthly possessions in a dumpster outside my old building. And the next day I woke up before the sun, grabbed my backpack, and left for Charleston.”