Then Devek came along. Devek was attentive. Devek was sweet. Devek was smart. Devek was funny. Devek was a doctor. I said to myself, I deserve a man like this. Okay, he wasn’t great in bed. Okay, he wasn’t very exciting. Okay, he wasn’t good-looking. But look what great in bed, exciting, and good-looking got me.

Then I found out I was pregnant. Luckily Chris mistook my half sister’s abortion papers—an abortion that I had paid for—as my abortion papers. He thought I had gotten rid of his baby. I had no idea what he would have done had he known the truth. He beat me up because he thought I didn’t want his child. Backhanded me hard across the face, two or three times. Not nearly as bad as what I had just gone through, but I had black eyes, cuts on my cheeks from his ring, and a bruised face. He might have done more, but then Gabe came in. That stopped Chris in his tracks. He stormed out. Later, he was dog-faced apologetic. He swore he’d never do it again. He begged me to come back to him.

I told him I’d think about it. Then I fled.

Luckily, he didn’t discover the truth until after I had escaped with Devek to India. We got divorced and I got remarried. I had left Gabe, who was almost fourteen, with the Deckers, figuring after a year or two, I could bring him back to live with me. A couple of problems with that: Devek didn’t want him, and Chris wouldn’t have ever let him go. So I abandoned my son, something for which I had yet to forgive myself. I never forgave Devek for being so cold to Gabe the few times he came to visit me. It made it much easier to leave him and come back to the States.

Once I decided to leave Devek, things didn’t go as planned. They never do. I expected a bad custody battle, but I never expected to wind up in a hospital with broken bones and with Chris not only nursing me back to health, but protecting Juleen. Eleven years later, I was back where I started. Recovering from a brutal walloping and without a son. But at least I had a place for my daughter and me … time to think. As long as I acceded to Chris’s wishes, I’d be okay. In a couple of months, I’d be in my own house with my kids, divorced from Devek, and away from Chris for the most part. I’d be working as a doctor. I’d be living a quiet and normal life.