My husband called me a whale, kissed his mistress in public, and told me to “dust the library.” Then he strutted into Asheville’s most exclusive Royal Estate Gala thinking he was untouchable.

He smirked and told me that he had already dined on expensive sushi at a nearby club while labeling my home cooked dinner as completely pedestrian. He looked down at my pregnant stomach and laughed with a cruel light in his eyes that I had never seen before we married.

He told me that I looked like a massive whale and suggested that I was becoming a sight he could no longer tolerate in his presence. I did not throw the expensive china at the wall or scream at the top of my lungs because I was too busy trying to remember if I still existed.

For several years, Jensen had been carefully training me to fade into the background of my own existence until I was little more than a ghost in my house. He had been so charming in the beginning of our relationship that I often doubted my own memories of his kindness.

He used to remember exactly how I liked my tea and he would hold the doors open for me as if I were the only person in the world who mattered. I fell deeply in love with that version of him and believed that he was the man I would grow old with in peace.