Chapter 3 - Things I’d Been Pretending Not to SeeBefore I tell you what happened next, I need to tell you this: men like David don’t start by shoving you into a checkout counter at Walmart.
They start by laughing when you cry.
They start by saying your sister is a bad influence because she asked why you stopped answering texts.
They start by taking your debit card “for budgeting” after you quit your job because the pregnancy got rough and he said he wanted to “take care of everything.”
They start by moving you forty minutes out of town into a gated subdivision full of people who wave from golf carts but never really look at you.
They start by correcting small details in your stories until you begin doing it yourself.
By the time we were in that store in Rockwall on a Wednesday at 3:17 in the afternoon, I’d already spent seven months shrinking my life to fit inside David’s moods.
He sold medical billing software. Or that’s what he said.
Always on the phone. Always weirdly jumpy when numbers came up. He’d take calls in the garage with the door shut even in June heat. If I walked in, he’d stop talking. Once I asked why he had three different cell phones in his desk drawer and he told me one was for “regional clients” and one was “old.”
I believed him because belief was cheaper than a fight.
And because I was pregnant.
And because my mother, God help her, loved to say, “All husbands are difficult. You make your bed.”
So I made it.
Even when I found cash stuffed inside a boot box in his closet.
Even when he took the baby registry off Target because “people don’t need to know our business.”
Even when he threw away the first pair of little socks I’d bought because they were “pointless.”
The weirdest part wasn’t the cruelty. It was the bookkeeping. Every diaper, every bottle, every prenatal vitamin became a personal insult to him. He’d spend six hundred dollars on a watch without blinking, but if I put baby shampoo in the cart, his jaw would lock.
I thought it was control.
May you like
I mean, it was control.
It just wasn’t only that.
Related Stories
