of the biggest mistakes of my life. I flicked through a couple more pages and with each photo that my eyes slid over, I felt less and less upset and more and more angry.
I closed the book, picked it up, got to my feet and put it back on the table of Anderson’s office. He always kept it there within touching distance, and I didn’t know why. I didn’t look happy in any of the pictures even though I was smiling from ear to ear. He was too stupid to see what was in front of him, or he simply didn’t care. I turned and left the room I was not allowed inside, and walked down the hallway and into the bathroom.
I stared in the mirror at myself, and when my eyes took in the swollen flesh of my cheek, the usual monologue that had replayed in my head the past few years didn’t start. The reasoning I automatically made up on behalf of my husband never began. The excuses I made for why Anderson did what he did never formed and didn’t make it to front and centre in my mind. The realisation of this made me gasp. I put a hand over my mouth.
“I’m done,” I said to myself in the mirror. “I’m so fucking . . . done.”
I began to cry and laugh as soon as the words left my mouth, even as my body began to tremble.
I’d given up my entire fucking life for this man, and for what? For him to beat me whenever I questioned him or did something he didn’t like? For him to control every little thing I did, from who I spoke with to the activities I took part in? Somehow, he had even convinced me that having a relationship with my parents was toxic for me, and that cutting them out was the only option if I wanted to have an open, healthy mind.
“Stupid,” I snapped at myself. “Stupid, stupid, stupid!”
I had options; I didn’t have to do anything that I didn’t want to . . . I just hadn’t realised that until now.
I wasn’t sure what had brought on this frame of mind. This thought process had never occurred to me before, I had always been so scared. Scared and never angry. Today, I was angry. Maybe the punch Anderson had landed on my face had knocked some sense into me. I’d allowed him to hurt me and drain me for far too long. He was evil. He’d manipulated me when I was at my most vulnerable. He’d used the heartache of the end of my relationship with Elliot against me so he could worm his way into my life and take over every little aspect of it.
At the start he was so wonderful – my knight in shining armour. He came to me when I was at the lowest point in my life, when getting out of bed became harder and harder to do every day. Everything I had lost in Elliot, I seemed to have found in Anderson. He worshipped me, told me he loved me, that he wanted to marry me, to have a family with me and be with me forever. I could now see that I was severely depressed and only saw the things I thought I wanted to see in Anderson . . . By the time I found out who he truly was, it was too late. I felt broken inside whenever he laid his hands on me, but once his anger subsided, he would return to the wonderful, kind man he was when we first met, and he would cry and cling to me as he apologised and swore it would never happen again.
But it would always happen again.
I dropped my hands and examined my face. The swelling and reddening of my flesh were nothing compared to injuries I had sustained before. I glanced at the white scar that cut through my eyebrow and recalled one of the first times Anderson hit me – he’d punched me so hard that my eyebrow busted open and I was knocked unconscious. That injury was the first time I’d woken up in a hospital because of my husband – the man who was supposed to love, cherish and protect me.
“Bollocks,” I grumbled. “What a load of fucking rubbish!”
I left the bathroom and headed straight for my bedroom. I felt myself begin to rush as I realised what I was doing. I was leaving. I