"At the same time, though, he was popular among his students. He could be charming. My friends didn’t realize how different he was when he was alone with me. I saw a face that he hid from everybody else, and sometimes I wondered if I was imagining things, or if there was something screwed up about me. When things went wrong, I blamed myself."
"This is classic, you know," Stephen said. "This is exactly how domestic abusers behave with their spouses. They crave control, and when they lose it, they get violent."
"He wasn’t violent at first. He didn’t even yell when he was angry. He got sarcastic instead. He would express his disappointment in me, as if I were a teenager with bad grades. I began to feel pressured and hemmed in.
"Then sex started getting weird. Not kinky, but hostile. Resentful. If I didn’t have an orgasm, he took it personally. He started having performance problems, for which he blamed me. I would try everything I could think of to please him, but it wasn't working and he made sure I felt responsible. Soon I began to dread having sex with him. I avoided it whenever I could, and felt guilty about
that
."
"Was that when you started wanting out?"
"Yes. I reacted to his control freakiness by turning rebellious. It seemed like ages since I’d laughed or had any fun. So I drank one more glass of wine than I should have at a department party and danced with this cute visiting professor from Italy. We were slow dancing. I'm sure it must have looked flirtatious, but we didn't actually do anything. Didn't even kiss. Just dirty danced a bit.
"But people saw us together. It was my department, not Derek's, which was why he hadn't deigned to come with me, but there were a couple of people from his department present. When I sobered up, I was ashamed."
"Did someone gossip to your husband?"
She winced. "No. I confessed. I felt guilty about making a spectacle of myself." She gulped a breath. "But if I’d known...if I’d had any idea what would happen…." She closed her eyes and shuddered. Stephen stroked her gently. This was going to be hard for her, he knew.
"We were in the kitchen after I got home from that party. I was sure some troublemaker would call Derek in the morning and tell him that his wife had slutted it up on the dance floor.
“So, awkwardly, with many hesitations, I explained what had happened. I made a heartfelt apology for the dancing thing and asked for his forgiveness. Then I went on to explain my feelings about our marriage. I had already suggested counseling, which he had refused. So I said I wanted to try a separation. I told him we couldn't continue the way we were.
"He didn’t say anything. He let me go on and on. He had this ashen look on his face, as if he were about to throw up or pass out or have a heart attack." She shuddered. "I started to worry about him. I stood up and went to try to touch him, embrace him, and his face turned all red and he leapt at me. He grabbed me around the neck and started squeezing, as if he was trying to strangle me." Her voice broke. "It’s still so painful to remember."
"Sweetheart. Can you feel my arms holding you? Can you feel my body sheltering yours? You’re safe here. Let’s excise this bad memory once and for all."
"I don’t know if that’s possible," she said in a low voice. "He started throttling me. I couldn’t breathe. His fingers were digging into my throat. It hurt horribly. He twisted, as if he were trying to snap my neck.
"Everything turned black, and I was sure I was going to die. I must have been thrashing and struggling, but it was as if he had super-human strength. I couldn’t free myself. At some point he flung me to the side and I must have collided with the kitchen counter because I felt a sickening pain in my chest. Next thing I knew, I hit the floor."
She stopped again. Her heart was pounding and her palms were slick with sweat. She focused on Stephen’s comforting body, his steady heartbeat.
"Derek dropped down beside me and starting punching me, pounding me, slamming my head against the tiles. He hit my breasts, my chest, my stomach. He kicked me in the side. He was shouting. I don’t know what he was saying—I must have been half unconscious because nothing made any sense. I was vaguely aware of things crashing around us. I guess I kicked out at the table and knocked the plates and glasses off. Or maybe he did that.
"The next thing I remember is that he had a big piece of glass in his fist. I think it was part of a tumbler that had fallen to the floor and broken. He put it to my throat and I thought, he’s really going to kill me.
"I fought, trying to get away, tossing my head around wildly. I felt the glass cutting into me and I heard myself screaming. Somehow, I got my hand up and grabbed his hand, the one that was holding the glass. I shoved it back toward his own face as hard as I could. It gouged his cheek.
“He howled like an injured animal, and then he started crying. He was trying to kill me, but he was the one who began to sob. There were tears streaming down his face.
"That was when I squirmed out from under him and made for the back door. I was barely conscious and every single part of me was screaming with pain. But I vaguely remembered that I had a cell phone in my pants pocket and that dialing 911 would summon help.
"I got the phone out and called. As I begged for help, I kept
crawlin
g. I was slick with my own blood. It was night and I couldn’t see properly. I don’t know where Derek was by then or why he stopped attacking me. I made the call, and then I passed out.
"When I woke up, I was in the hospital. My father was with me. He stayed with me every minute, and he promised me Derek would never come near me again. For a while, after I got out of the hospital, I lived in terror that he would come after me, but the only thing he did was call me obsessively.
"The police had arrested him for domestic violence and assault, and I filed for divorce. He got a crack defense attorney. Because he'd been cut by the glass as well, he tried to sell the story that I had attacked him first. Maybe they believed him. Anyway, it was his first offense and he’d never even had a traffic ticket, so he got off easily—anger management classes or something.
"I didn’t care what happened to him. I just wanted it to be over. I moved in with my dad, because I had no place else to go. In the beginning, I was so traumatized that I was afraid to be alone. I didn’t want anything from Derek—money or property or anything from the marriage. I just wanted to be free and for him to leave me alone.
"Dad took amazing care of me. He didn't leave my side. I know you don't like my father, but when this happened, he was awesome."
"I'm glad he was there for you." Her father, gruff and domineering in so many ways, had always been protective. He was an arrogant bastard, but hell, Stephen had no doubt that he'd have done everything in his power to take care of his daughter.
As he intended to do now.
"I used to think I was good at reading people," she went on. "But I never saw Derek's violence coming. Before it happened, I was certain he would never lay a rough hand on any woman, much less someone he professed to love."
"He probably didn't love you anywhere near as much as he loved himself, the bastard."
"That's it exactly. Deep down all there was in him was a void. Even after the end, after he beat me so badly, after I left him..." she paused. "He tried to get me back. Back under his control. Sometimes I'm afraid he's still trying."
"What do you mean?" His voice had grown sharp.
"I don't know. There have been some hang-ups on my phone. Probably just marketing calls—I get those all the time and I ignore them. But I'm anxious so I'm imagining things. There was a car that parked on the street outside my house the other night for a few minutes. It made me remember how obsessive he was about me."
"What car? Did you get the license plate number?"
"No, it was dark. But it could have been anybody. Just someone visiting the neighbors. Hopefully Derek's still on the other side of the globe."
He'd fucking better be or the guy was going to be damn sorry. "We can find out."
"We can? How?"
"I know some people. There are ways to track these things down."
"It would be a relief to know he's still in Australia."
They lay in silence for a few minutes while he gently massaged her tight shoulders. "Thank you for telling me. I know it was hard for you. But you did fine. You got through that explanation like a champion." He smoothed her cheeks and kissed her forehead. "No tears. No panic. You didn't break down."
"I haven't cried since that night. Not once. I did see a therapist for a while, and she thought I needed to cry about it. But I won't. I won't give that creep the satisfaction."
"You do know that what happened wasn't your fault?"
"I know. The marriage would have ended anyway, but maybe it wouldn't have ended in violence if I had been a little more mature, a little more insightful."
"Viola. There is never any excuse for what he did to you. Never."
She hugged him hard. "You're one of the good guys, Stephen. Thank you for being so understanding."
"No problem, babe. You make it easy to care about you."
Later that night, Stephen had one of those ideas for his book that was so insistent that he was forced to get out of bed and write it down. It happened often when he was in one of his creative periods.
He left Viola sleeping and went into the living room with the laptop she had lent him. The neighborhood was quiet, since it was well after midnight. He vaguely heard a car driving down the street. He probably wouldn't have noticed it at all if he had not grown so accustomed to the lack of traffic near his quiet beach-side home.
He went to the window and glanced out. The car passed the house and continued on down the street. He watched for a couple of minutes, but it did not come back.
There was no reason to think that Viola's fears about Derek's possible return were anything but the shadows she had admitted them to be. Still, he wanted to make sure, so he decided to call Max.
His friend Max was a computer genius and a software baron. And he was almost always awake in the middle of the night. Stephen pulled out his phone and called.
After the usual cheerful insults were exchanged, he asked, "Can you check whether somebody is actually in the country where he is believed to be? As opposed to being here in the USA?"
"Sure. Within limits. If he's an ordinary guy, it's easy. If you want Ed Snowden's precise whereabouts, that will be a little bit harder."
"I think this guy is ordinary. Middle-aged. Not a techie type. He is believed to be in Australia, where he returned after living in the States for a number of years. But I want to be sure he's on another distant continent instead of here, stalking my girlfriend. He's her ex-husband, and he abused her."
"You have a new girlfriend?"
"I do. Can you do it?"
"Easy. Is she kinky?"
"None of your business." He didn't know whether Max was kinky himself, but he did know the guy was strange. "What kind of information do you need me to give you about the guy?"
"Send me whatever you know about him. Does he have a web presence?"
"He's supposedly a professor of anthropology at some university in Australia, but I want to be sure he's actually there, teaching his classes and living his life far away from my girl. I'll email you everything I can find about him online, if you can check the more direct evidence, however you do that shit."
"I can probably get current surveillance photos that will establish his location. Is that the sort of thing you want?"
"If you can get current pictures, yeah, I want them."
"I'll give it a whirl. What else do you need? Why do you suspect stalking? Has he been calling her? Emailing? Harassing her on social media?"
"She said she had some hang ups, but they might be marketing calls."
"Give me her phone number. I can trace her calls."
"Isn't that illegal?"
Max laughed. "Tell that to the NSA."
"You computer guys are fucking scary."
"Be afraid, Silkwood. Be very afraid."
The next thing Stephen did to ensure Viola's safety was harder. After he got back home to the Cape, it took him a whole day to psyche himself up for it.
He went to visit Viola's father. As he rapped on the door of Percy Quentin's cottage, he could feel the tension buzzing in his neck and shoulders. He had to concentrate to force his fingers from automatically curling into fists.
Breathe, he ordered himself. He wasn't here for Percy. He was here for Viola.
When the door opened, the big man stood there, his eyes blinking against the bright sunlight. He looked older, but he was still in reasonably decent shape. His mane of hair was messy, and matching his unkempt beard. He also had more of a belly than he used to have. That'll happen if you sit in front of a computer screen all day long.
"What the fuck are you doing here?" was all the welcome Stephen received.
"Let me in, Percy. We need to talk."
Percy folded his arms over his chest. He filled the doorway. "About what?" He sounded aggressive and challenging, as always, but suddenly his face crumpled. "Is it my daughter? Has something happened to her?"