Before the wedding: What he told me on our first date
On our first date, the man I would marry told me he was addicted to opiates.
I didn’t know what an opiate was. I had spent half my childhood on the other side of the world in a missionary family, and I’d been raised to forgive and to believe people when they said they would change. I didn’t ask questions. I just kept going.
He had been taking narcotic painkillers for years before he met me. He went on and off them, week to week, and told me he was clean when he wasn’t. I couldn’t always tell. I tried, in my own strength, to get him off them. In the end I told him I would leave unless he went to a clinic. He went, and they put him on Suboxone.
Years later, at a restaurant on Lake Erie, he said it to me plainly, and I had a recorder running:
“I was on opiates the entire time we were dating careyann for two years”
I didn’t know any of that the way I know it now. I believed him. I married him in January 2012, in El Segundo, and by April I was pregnant with my first son.
I loved that baby from the moment I knew he was there. We were living in California then, near the grandfather I hadn’t seen since I was five. I had a job doing web design and marketing for a company I loved. When I look at the pictures from that winter, I see a woman who thought she knew what her life was going to look like.
But even then there were things I didn’t put in the pictures. When I questioned some of what was being taught at the church we attended, men at that church told my husband I was “a domineering woman” and that I “needed to put a lid on my mouth.” He took their side before he took mine. It was the first time I watched him close a door between us, and it would not be the last.
My Older Son was born in January 2013. A few weeks later, we decided to move back to Ohio to be near my husband’s family. It would be too hard, we said, to raise a baby with no help and no family around.
Wednesday, March 6, 2013: Ohio
We moved to Ohio on March 6, 2013. His father helped us get into a condo.
The year I lived in that condo was the hardest year of my life up to that point. I was a new mother in a new place, and I didn’t know anyone. My son woke every two or three hours, hungry and crying. He was colicky, and he kept that same sleep pattern for close to two years. I tried to keep working from home for the company in California. I’d strap him to my chest in his carrier, because that was the only way he would sleep, and I’d clean and cook and try to answer emails with him there. Eventually I had to stop working. He wouldn’t sleep long enough for me to get anything done.
My husband went to work for his father’s roofing company. That November, on the 6th, he was given stock in his father’s company, and we went to a lawyer’s office to sign the papers. Money was always tight anyway. Most weeknights we ate dinner at his parents’ house.
And at home, he had put up a wall.
From the time we moved to Ohio, he nitpicked everything I did. Cleaning, cooking, everything in between. If it wasn’t done exactly his way, I heard about it. I made him special meals and he’d tell me his mother’s were better. Once I made him an egg baked in an avocado from a recipe I’d found. He looked at it, said “that’s disgusting I’m not eating that!” and went back upstairs. I could never measure up to the way he wanted things done.
The door
One evening that year, after a hard visit at his parents’ house, I came home exhausted and told him I didn’t want to go over there for dinner anymore.
He flipped out. He pushed me up against the door by my neck and threatened my life.
My baby was sitting on the floor next to us. All I could think to say was, “please not in front of [my Older Son] please im sorry im sorry.”
He told me he wished he had never married me.
I called his mother and told her what had happened, and she rushed over to the condo. He ran upstairs, got into bed, pulled the sheets over his head, shut the door, and wouldn’t come out. His mother apologized to me. When he finally came downstairs, she told him it was all her fault and he shouldn’t be mad at me.
That was how it went, again and again over the next nine years. Something terrible would happen, someone would apologize, and the next morning I was expected to act as if it hadn’t.
I sank into a deep depression after that night. Nobody knew. I was too tired and too ashamed to say it out loud.
2013–2018: The nights
There is something I couldn’t say out loud for most of my marriage. I’m going to say it here, plainly, because it is true.
My husband raped me.
A few months after my Older Son was born, it started happening in the middle of the night. I would be sound asleep, and I would wake up to find him taking advantage of me. It became the only kind of intimacy in our marriage. In 2018 I wrote, “We rarely ever had sex and when we did it was when I was sound asleep and he was raping me.”
Having a baby in my arms didn’t stop him. One night, while I was nursing my Younger Son in the dark, he molested me.
Across all our years of marriage, I can remember only a few times that were truly consensual. There was no tenderness and no affection. I never learned what a normal, healthy closeness between a husband and wife feels like. I felt like a piece of meat. On September 3, 2018, I wrote four words in my notes: “I felt like an object.”
I went to the pastor of our old church for help, because the only time my husband had sex with me was while I was asleep.
A woman who is asleep can’t say yes. I never said yes. I’m not writing this to shame anyone. I’m writing it because it happened to me, inside our house, for years, and because leaving it out would make this a different story from the one I lived.
Winters in Florida
His parents spent every winter in Florida, and so did we. From January to March in 2014, and again in 2015, we went south for the winter. My mother and father lived in Florida too.
Those winters were a lifeline for me. The ocean has always brought me back to myself. Years later, in January 2022, sick with shingles in Florida, I texted him a line I could have written any year of our marriage:
“And being in Florida has brought me to life even with shingles - I need the ocean like I need air”
The house
We started looking for a house because we didn’t want to keep paying rent. On the way home from church one day, we passed a for-sale sign at the end of a road and turned around to look. I said, “This is our house.”
He didn’t believe we could do it. We had no money saved. My mother had just recovered money from a lawsuit, and I asked my parents for a loan. It took a lot of convincing and a lot of prayer, but they agreed. We drew up papers, and the house closed on December 7, 2014, my birthday.
It needed a lot of work, but it was ours. It had a huge yard, and that yard became its own kind of trouble. My husband would spend all of a Saturday, every two or three weeks, mowing, picking up sticks, and blowing leaves. I wanted to help. One week I picked up sticks and borrowed my neighbor’s push blower and spent three hours blowing the leaves off one side of the yard. The whole time I was wondering if he’d yell at me for doing it wrong. When he came home, he told me I needed to let him do it, because he wanted it done right.
All I ever wanted was for my husband to be my best friend, and to do things together. We hardly ever did anything together. Even on our first wedding anniversary, back in California, we did nothing at all. I didn’t get a card.
The car window
I don’t have the exact date of the car ride. I know it was after we stopped riding to church with his mother and started driving ourselves, and I know my Older Son was asleep in his car seat in the back.
On the way home from church, I started to tell my husband how tired I was of how his mother treated me. He told me I’d better stop talking right now or he was going to crash the car. I said one more thing.
He pushed my head against the car window. He ripped my little mirror off the rearview mirror because, he said, “I can’t even look at you right now.” Then he said, “I want to kill you, I’m going to crash this car if you keep talking, keep your face on the glass so I don’t have to look at you.”
I sat there with my face against the glass, afraid for my son’s life. The thought in my head was, Well, this is it, I’m going to die. I hope he doesn’t have his knife on him.
When we got home, I jumped into the driver’s seat and drove away. I didn’t know where I was going. I was trying to work out whether a restraining order would actually stop him, or whether he’d come after me anyway, and whether I should move back to Florida to be with my family. He called not long after and asked where I was. I told him I wanted a divorce, and that he should figure out how to sell the house, because we were done.
We weren’t done. I came home.
2015: The hole in the wall
In my notes from 2015 there’s a line with no date beside it: Punched hole in wall.
That year I kept trying to make the marriage work, and I kept writing down the small things too, because the small things were wearing me away.
On Sunday, October 4, 2015, we were getting ready for church. I opened a bag of snacks, and he went off on me about how bad it was for me to eat that junk. In the car I told him how condemned he made me feel every time he told me what I could and couldn’t eat, and I prayed silently that God would speak to him through the sermon. The visiting minister that morning preached a sermon called “Put Away The Guilt Of The Innocent.” It was about how we shouldn’t be condemning one another. It covered almost word for word everything we’d said in the car. I just thanked the Lord.
On November 7, I baked muffins and an apple crisp. He tasted it and immediately said “I liked [someone else’s] pie better.” I’d put so much effort into it. Every time I tried to please him, I got compared and put down, until I felt there was no point in trying at all. That week I was at the lowest point I had ever been. I called my mother and asked her to come.
She drove up on Wednesday, November 11. My husband wouldn’t stay in the house while my family was there. He spent the night on the couch at his father’s office.
By that weekend, it had come down to the thing it always came down to. I told him to choose: me, or the drugs. In my own words from that time, he picked the drugs. I told him I was leaving him and going to Florida with my mother. I packed my bags for an extended stay. We loaded the car and started to drive.
And then we turned around and drove back home, because I just didn’t feel like I could leave.
He didn’t answer my calls or messages for three days. His father told me he was at the office.
Wednesday, December 9, 2015: The lake
On December 9, the weather was in the fifties, and I went down to the lake to be alone. It was gray and overcast. I walked out along the boardwalk and onto the rocks by the pier, and I asked God to move the clouds away and let the sun shine on me.
I sat down with my Bible to pray, and the clouds rolled back until there wasn’t a dark one left in the sky. A few days earlier I had prayed that I wanted the Lord to be my husband. I asked Him to speak to me about my marriage. The wind blew my Bible open to a chapter written to a woman who had been abandoned:
“For thy Maker is thine husband; the LORD of hosts is his name.”
I held on to that for years.
Saturday, February 6, 2016: My phone
My notes from that winter have a single line on February 6, 2016:
[He] broke my phone.
I wrote it down and moved on to the next thing. That was how I survived. I wrote it down, and then I made dinner.
In May 2017 my Younger Son was born. I told that part of the story in the last chapter. What I didn’t say there is that I now had two little boys watching everything that happened inside our house.
2018: The year I wrote everything down
By 2018 I had started keeping a running record of my days. Most of the entries are ordinary: a playdate at the park, a chiropractor visit for one of the boys, a library story time, a hike to a waterfall. Scattered among them are the other entries.
From January 20 to March 7, 2018, we were in Florida for the winter. My husband worked in his father’s Lantana office every day and usually came home late.
On February 19, my Older Son said something about the difference between the way his father treated me and the way his father treated his own mother. My husband physically assaulted me and raged at me in the car, with both boys in the back seat.
On March 9, at our anniversary dinner, in public, he screamed at me that all I was good for was cooking, cleaning, and taking care of the kids.
On June 1, he left me alone with the boys for the weekend and rented an RV to party with his college fraternity brothers.
In October, my mother came to town to see her grandsons. My husband wouldn’t allow her to stay in our home, so she got a hotel.
I spent that year sending him articles: on verbal abuse and anxiety, on chronic fatigue, on what it does to children to have an uninvolved father, on therapists, on ways to get clean. I was afraid to accuse him of anything directly, so I sent him things that described him and hoped he’d see himself.
Monday, October 29, 2018: The vows
That evening I made dinner, and he complained about it. I had started recording our conversations, so I have the words exactly. I asked him whether there was anything he liked about me at all.
Then I picked up the vows he had written for our wedding and read them to him out loud.
ME: (Reading [his] vows) I love you more than anyone or anything on this earth. From the first day I met you, something inside of me knew that this day would come. I could immediately tell that there was nothing fake or pretentious about you.
HE: Interjects BULLSHIT!!!
I kept reading. He kept interrupting.
HE: Everybody makes mistakes!!!
ME: So I was a mistake?
HE: YES!
I asked him if he wanted to go to therapy. I asked if we should just get separate houses and split the time with the kids, if he was that miserable. He said, “No. That’s dumb!” Then he yelled at me about a box I hadn’t thrown away yet.
Our Older Son was sitting at the table with us the whole time, playing with his empty bowl.
Saturday, November 24, 2018: The carrot
A month later I was sick in bed. My five-year-old came upstairs crying because he had lost a carrot. He was scared his father would yell at him about it. I have the recording of what I said next:
ME: Your son came over here crying because he lost his carrot. He said “I don’t want daddy to yell at me, how ..how much does a bag of carrots cost? Hes … hes yelling about money.”
I asked my husband to be gentler with his son. Then I asked him why he was in such a bad mood again, after being nice for about a week.
HE: You put me in a bad mood
HE: Cynical I don’t even remember. It doesn’t really matter
HE: Just go to sleep
January 2019: Florida
We spent the beginning of 2019 in Florida again. I have pictures of sunsets from the balcony and of light on the water. It looks like a vacation. In my body it didn’t feel like one.
That spring, I made up my mind.
Saturday, May 18, 2019: Dinner on the lake
On May 18, 2019, he took me to dinner at Pier W, a restaurant above Lake Erie. That night I told him it was done. I told him we needed to separate, because he was never going to quit the drugs.
I recorded the conversation. I asked him to get off the Suboxone and the kratom, to get healthy, and to give me a date. He told me he’d found a therapist. Then he told me how much Suboxone he took, and then he told me the truth about our dating years:
HE: I was on opiates the entire time we were dating careyann for two years
When I told him I didn’t want to be married to a drug addict, he argued with the word:
HE: I’m 100% dependent on suboxone
ME: Ok so that’s called addiction
HE: Addiction is different than dependency.
When I told him an apology didn’t erase years of how he’d treated me, he said:
HE: IM SORRY! What do you want me to do? You want me to go to jail or something? You want me to go like get ten lashes? Would you like me to uhh..i mean… should I bleed? You want me to bleed for these uhhh…transgressions…is that what you want?
And at one point he said, “I don’t know, maybe we should just get divorced then.”
The therapist
He did find us a therapist after that dinner. He went with me exactly once. As I later told someone helping me, “when she gave him an anger management guide, he decided she wasn’t right for us.” He never went to anyone I recommended.
Sunday, June 9, 2019: “You should be”
Three weeks after that dinner, he yelled at me all day. That evening he got right in my face.
I didn’t call anyone. I texted him, because that was the only place I felt safe saying it:
“I hope your huge ego and pride and telling me you were going to kill me was worth it”
“You got straight in my face and when I said I’m not scared of you you said you should be I’ll kill you”
He told me he wanted to do better. I wrote back:
“Uhh no - daddy threatened to kill mommy after yelling at her all day - that doesn’t exactly scream trying to do better in my book sincere apology is followed by changed behavior”
I told him, “I’ve felt abused for years [my husband].”
He answered, “And neglect is neglect, not abuse.”
He had threatened me in front of our sons.
Friday, July 19, 2019: “I crushed your spirit”
That summer he wrote to me in his own words:
“And I know it’s my fault and I’m the one that crushed your spirit and killed your feelings for me, but it doesn’t make it any easier that my wife truly doesn’t like me…”
That same day he texted, “I will probably be your dream man 2 years after our divorce.”
The RV
In August 2019 he bought an RV. He’d been sending me listings for weeks, and one used model he found was priced at $56,999. In my understanding, the RV was going to be where he lived once we separated. Instead it became the center of our weekends. We booked a spot for it at Hocking Hills. By September 9 I was texting him, “The rv is due and we need some money.”
In October 2019 I arranged to start a job outside the home, and I asked his mother to help with the boys.
Tuesday, November 26, 2019: Letters in his bag
At 4:13 that afternoon, my husband texted me:
“Can you please pick the kids up after work? I’m not doing good and am scared. I’m going to call the hotline.”
He also texted me that there were letters for everyone in the back pocket of his bag, and he gave me the password to his computer.
I forwarded what he’d sent to his mother, and his family called the police. The Sagamore Hills police report says his mother explained that her son had been struggling with thoughts of ending his life “for the last several years.” It also says “she stated she took a .22 rifle from him 2 years ago, but since he has it back.” I told the officers he had a pistol, though I didn’t know what kind, and that it might be with him in the truck.
At 4:42 his mother texted me, “Police are here.” I asked her, “Can’t they track his phone?” At 5:26 she wrote:
“My heart is absolutely breaking. It is not just one thing, he told me there is something wrong with him. He told me he was scared too.”
Five departments looked for him that night: Sagamore Hills, Macedonia, Valley View, Walton Hills, and the National Park Service. Police pinged his phone. When it got dark, they called off the search until morning. Then the pings moved, and at 7:53 PM Patrolman Roxbury reported that she had him and his truck and would be out at our house. That was the same officer whose testimony would matter so much to my family in 2022.
The officer who wrote the report recorded something I didn’t know: “Once we arrived, I recognized the male from previously dealing with him.”
My husband told them he had just been clearing his head, sitting in his truck in a parking lot. They asked about the gun. “All [he] kept saying was that he got rid of it.” Eventually he said “he just threw it in the trash.” The officer asked me to see whether I could tell if he was on drugs, “as he is a past heroin user and currently taking Suboxone.” My sons were there. He admitted to the officer that he’d had those thoughts, and he agreed to go voluntarily to Akron City Hospital.
A few hours later, at 1:57 in the morning, the texts started:
“I NEVER SAID I HAD A GUN”
“No gun”
“Well thanks to you I’m down here in Akron having to walk around with my knife out so I don’t get mugged”
That was the pattern, and I want to name it here so you’ll recognize it later. He was the one in crisis, and by morning it was my fault.
December 6–8, 2019: Niagara Falls
On December 4, I told a friend I couldn’t make her party: “No party this week - [my husband] is taking me to Niagara Falls for the weekend.”
It was the first vacation he ever took me on. As I understood it at the time, his father gave him $1,500 for the trip. We stayed at the Marriott on Fallsview Boulevard.
I let myself hope that weekend. I think anyone would have. Three days after we got home, he texted me:
“Super fun. I love you Careyann. I’m sorry things have been the way they were in the past and the way that I’ve acted. But let’s put all that crap in the past and keep our eyes on the road ahead. I predict (or prophesy, if you prefer) that Niagara Falls will always hold a special place in our hearts as the turning point in our marriage and in our individual lives. As long as we continue to communicate our thoughts, feelings and needs remembering that love should be at the center of what we do and try to put each other first, the sky is the limit for [our] family.”
It was a turning point, though not the kind he meant. His last paycheck from his father’s company was dated December 27, 2019. He testified later that he worked for his father from March 2013 to December 2019, and that he didn’t start working again until April 2022. I went to work.
Two years later, in January 2022, he texted me: “I tried listening to my favorite musical artist of all time and I felt like I was falling off of Niagara Falls…”
2020: Working
From 2020 on, I was the one earning the money. I worked full time on top of being home with the boys, and I sold health products from my phone, often from the couch, because some days that was as far as my body would carry me. I kept the house and the boys and the schedule.
On September 12, 2020, I texted his mother that her son was in the house screaming at me while the cleaning lady was cleaning my shower.
Friday, October 9, 2020
On October 9, 2020, in front of our garage, my husband hit my Younger Son so hard that he fell to the ground. My Older Son watched it happen. The bruises, with his father’s handprint, lasted nearly a week. There is a photograph of them. In 2022, a judge looked at that photograph and called it an “overzealous spanking.”
On November 14, 2020, by his own later testimony, he fell off a twelve-foot roof and landed on his elbow. He was in the hospital with a broken elbow and went on to have several surgeries. The doctor told us it would take him eighteen months to heal; the court’s June 2022 order, drawing on his own testimony, put his recovery at “between 18 months to 2 years.” My mother had stopped being able to pay for the cleaning lady that October. Now I had two little boys, a job, a house, and an injured husband.
Those eighteen months matter to the rest of this story, because they’re the same stretch of time in which he would later claim to have been our sons’ primary caregiver. His own texts from that winter tell it differently. On Monday, January 11, 2021, at 11:03 AM, I asked him whether his mother was picking up our Younger Son from preschool or whether he was. At 11:44 AM he answered:
“I guess I am, but he’ll have to ride home unbuckled in his seat as I’m not physically able to buckle his belt with one hand…”
At 12:01 PM:
“I just talked to my dad and he offered to get [my Younger Son] for me.”
A month earlier, on December 21, 2020, he had written: “It’s really hard to make food and shit with one hand, you should try it sometime.”
On May 13, 2022, his attorney, Lisa Carey Dean, filed his sworn affidavit stating: “During my marriage, I was a stay-at-home father while Defendant was the primary income-earner for our family.” The court’s June 8, 2022 order found that until May 6, 2022, he had been “the primary caregiver for the children.” Both of those came after the January morning when, by his own words, he couldn’t buckle our son into his car seat.
Wednesday, January 20, 2021: “Before you leave me”
My mother came to visit in January 2021. I was recording again. In the recording from that day, she tells my father on the phone that my husband had poured his heart out to her and apologized for how mean he’d been to her in the past.
Later that day, my husband said this to me:
“Im trying to get my shit together before you leave me. I’ve got a lot more to lose than he did.”
He knew I was going. Everyone in that house knew it.
Sunday, February 7, 2021: The green dot
In February 2021 I was getting ready for a trip to Florida. He was watching when I was online. That morning he texted me:
“Yeah, when you’re on it there’s a green dot next to it”
Ten minutes later:
“I didn’t want to say this until you were leaving, but out of the many things I would’ve done in your shoes to alleviate my fears while 1500 miles away - I would’ve said I’m not doing anything wrong and I have nothing to hide so I’ll turn my location back on for the trip so you’ll know where I’m at and not worry that I’m somewhere I shouldn’t be.”
Back on. That was how normal it had become for him to know where I was at all times.
I’ve since learned much more about how he kept track of me. I found recording devices in my purse, under my bed, and in my car, and I believe there were others I never found. There was a GPS tracker on my car for years, a keylogger on my computer, and an app on my phone so he’d know who I was talking to. He would turn up where I was, at Kohl’s and other stores, just to make sure I knew that he knew. I saw the receipts for the phone-tracking app. Months after he moved out, in June 2022, I found a Sony voice recorder. That belongs to a later chapter.
Tuesday, February 23, 2021: The story he was already writing
Sixteen days later, he wrote out a story about me in a text, and I want to put it in the record exactly as it was. He wrote that I said I wanted to fix things but really “just wants you to play along until she can get a house.”
The next year, in court, he would claim I was going to “abscond” with our sons. Here he was in February 2021, writing the outline. Everything he texted after 2019 reads that way to me now: not a record of what I did, but a story he was telling about me, in advance, to whoever would one day read it.
March 2021: “Mommy are you going to die?”
On March 5, 2021, I texted his mother:
“He needs to move out of this house”
“He’s screaming through the house hitting things”
Friday, March 12, 2021
On the afternoon of March 12, 2021, he texted me, “If not, we are officially separated and I am going to file for divorce.” A few minutes later he wrote, “Gaslighting is psychological abuse and that’s what you’re doing to me.”
That night, I was putting my Younger Son to bed. My husband came into the room, attacked me, pinned me down on our three-year-old’s bed, and strangled me. He blamed it on the Patrón he’d been drinking. My Older Son, who was eight, stood in the doorway and watched. My Younger Son screamed and cried and asked me if I was going to die.
As his grip tightened around my neck and the pressure built in my head, I thought, for certain, that I was going to die.
I tried to call the police. He stood over me and didn’t leave my side for the rest of the night.
A few days later I was in Florida. On March 24, I finally told his mother in writing:
“I didn’t say anything but a few days before Florida he pinned me down on [my Younger Son]’s bed in front of both boys and was screaming at me with his hands around my neck which the boys screamed in the background and [my Younger Son] said mommy are you going to die? I’m scared”
“The boys are watching their father physically abuse their mother and verbally abuse me daily”
And earlier that same evening:
“[My Younger Son] said do you love mommy? Why are you yelling at her?”
A friend had offered to let me and the boys move into her house. I told his mother that he was “threatening me that I can’t take the kids for any amount of time if I want to move out.”
His answer to me that night:
“Call the police if it was such an ATTACK”
On March 29, he texted me, “I spanked him on the butt.” I wrote back: “don’t you ever touch him or spank him.” Two days later I sent him the name of a counselor who “Specializes in anger management and emotional regulation issues.”
January 2022: The last month
By the start of 2022 we were talking openly about winters in Florida, the way we’d lived most of our marriage. On January 2 he texted me, “I’m personally setting up Florida 2022-23 if you’re willing to work with me.” The next day he complained about “taking a 4 year old away from his father for 6 months.” I wrote back, “February March and april is three months,” and then, “Ok when do you want to move to Florida.”
On January 8, I came down with shingles. In my notes I wrote that it came from extreme stress. He told me not to come home, so the boys wouldn’t catch chicken pox from me.
Monday, January 24, 2022: The kitchen knife
At 11:45 that morning I texted a friend:
“He just said he’s ready to get out the kitchen knife”
My friend asked if I needed to call the police.
At 12:14 I texted Milo: “I’m ready now for that divorce.”
Milo Valenti had told me he would help me escape my marriage. I had gone into business with him in the fall of 2021, and that is how his daughter, Kimberly Valenti, later became my lawyer.
At 12:45 I texted my husband, word for word, what I had heard him saying, including “women shouldn’t be able to vote or have any kind of control” and “I joined the group men going their own way.” He wrote back, “You got the wrong idea,” and then:
“Lol - hahaha - exactly what I was talking about when you were unknowingly and unintelligibly recording me out of context…”
He wasn’t upset about what he’d said. He was upset that I’d caught it.
That afternoon I drove to the airport to pick up my mother.
Saturday, February 5, 2022: The bar
The night of February 4 he got into a bar fight. At 1:11 in the morning he texted me that Milo had threatened him. Later that morning Milo texted me that my husband “also threatened he was coming back with a gun.”
I was too afraid to call 911 myself. I was afraid of what my husband would do to me if he found out I was the one who called. So I called a Sagamore Hills officer I knew personally, and he sent officers to the scene.
At 12:45 that afternoon I texted my mother:
“Bar fight lay night and was screaming at me all night”
Sunday, February 6, 2022: “HELP ME MOVE OUT”
The next morning I texted my oldest friend: “Want to come visit and help me move out?”
Three minutes later, to my mother, in capital letters:
“HELP ME MOVE OUT”
She was frightened for me, and she was worried about the law. She told me she was glad I was going to see a lawyer the next day, and that “if you are personally in danger you could go to a hotel for a night or 2 until you know what the lawyer says.”
I told my friend I was seeing a lawyer the next day:
“I’m talking to lawyer tomorrow about what I can do with kids”
That afternoon, I wrote to my mother one more time about the night on my Younger Son’s bed: “When he pinned me down on [my Younger Son]’s bed in front of both boys screaming at me and [my Younger Son] asked me if I was dying.”
On Monday, February 7, the boys spent the night at their grandmother’s.
Monday, February 14, 2022
Valentine’s Day. My notes for that date say only this: the boys spent the night at their grandmother’s.
I don’t have a recording from that night, or a text that says what I was feeling. I have the list of what had already happened: the door in the condo, the car window, the hole in the wall, the phone, the carrot, the vows, I’ll kill you, the letters in his bag, the green dot, my son’s bed, the kitchen knife, the gun he was supposedly coming back with. Ten years of marriage, most of them in a house my parents had helped us buy.
I’d been trying to leave for most of those years. I’d packed the car once and turned around. I’d told him I wanted a divorce on the phone after the car ride, at a dinner table above the lake, and in text messages. Every time, something pulled me back. Sometimes it was an apology, sometimes a trip, sometimes a threat, and sometimes just the plain fact that I had two little boys and nowhere I felt safe taking them.
The next afternoon, at 12:27, I called the National Domestic Violence Hotline. An hour later the police were in my house. When I walked out to my car afterward, my left rear tire was flat. I believed then, and told the officers, that he had slit it with the blade they took out of his hand. That day, Tuesday, February 15, 2022, is where this book began.