“Three years into their marriage, her husband had always avoided touching her… until the night she heard a strange voice in her mother-in-law’s room in Austin. The secret behind that door left her completely paralyzed.”

After the wedding, I moved into his house, a large two story home in a quiet neighborhood outside Austin where he lived with his mother Evelyn, a widow in her late fifties who rarely left her room and spent most of her time reading or watching television.

She was polite but distant, and at first I thought she was simply reserved, so I tried my best to adapt to my new life by cooking, cleaning, and learning the rhythm of the household, believing everything was normal.

There was only one thing that felt strange from the very beginning, and that was Logan’s constant avoidance of intimacy.

On our wedding night, when I sat beside him feeling nervous but hopeful, he gently took my hand and said, “I think we should wait a little,” and when I asked, “Wait for what,” he only smiled softly and said, “There is no rush.”

I assumed he was overwhelmed from the wedding, so I did not push, but that little delay turned into weeks, then months, and eventually years.