Page 66 of Stay Away from Him

But it’s time to get it all out now. To put the ugly truth down somewhere. Because I’m scared.

Scared that something will happen to me before I can tell the truth.

***

It all started weeks ago, after Thomas told me I needed to quit therapy. That it wasn’t working. That I needed to try something else—so I wouldn’t destroy this family. That’s what he told me. That I was destroying my family.

I agreed without a fight. I was too beaten down to do anything else. Too afraid.

But then, in the days that followed, I had an idea. Maybe, I thought, Thomas was right—therapy wasn’t helping. But that was because I wasn’t the only one with a problem. Maybe Thomas and I needed to go to someone together. Couples therapy. Or even family therapy, with the girls. Thomas liked to think that I was the crazy one, the messed-up one, the broken one. But what if Thomas was wrong? What if they all were wrong? What if my problems wereourproblems, and we could fix them together?

Thinking about it, I began to feel hope—real hope—for the first time since I could remember. For a whole day, I felt my depression dissipating. There was a light at the end of thetunnel. I was going to fix my family, my marriage, myself. I could do this.

***

I brought up the topic with Thomas the next night, after the girls were in bed. I was in bed too, sitting propped against pillows under the light of my reading lamp, waiting for Thomas to brush his teeth in the master bath. When he finally came in and crawled beneath the sheets, I put my hand on his arm.

He gave me a strange look, a surprised smile on his lips. Maybe he thought I wanted to have sex—it had been months, and I knew that I ought to give that to him, that it’d be good for our feeling of connection to each other. I knew he’d be disappointed when he found out what I really wanted, and I resolved that after he said yes to what I was going to ask, we’d have sex that night, as a sort of reward. The start of something new between us.

But that’s not what happened.

“You were right to suggest that therapy wasn’t helping me,” I started, coming right out with it. “But that’s because our problems are about more than just me. They’re about us. We all need help. And we need to seek it together.”

Thomas’s smile dimmed.

“Rose,” he said, with the tone of a father speaking patiently to an irrational child, “it sounds to me like you’re being defensive. Blaming me for your problems, instead of confronting your own issues.”

I let out a frustrated breath, put my chin down so Thomas couldn’t see my face. This wasn’t going at all the way I had planned.

“Thomas,” I said. “I need you to hear me. I want to goto someone else. And I want you to come with me. It’s time to get honest about what’s wrong with us. With you and me, and with this family.”

Thomas glowered, his eyebrows moving down into a hard line. “What does that mean, time to get honest? Are you threatening me?”

“Threatening? Thomas, no. What could be threatening about—”

“Because if you want to talk about what’s wrong with this family—well, Rose, I think you’ve always been the problem here. Since the beginning.”

Hurt stabbed through me, and I flinched. “You don’t mean that.”

His face had transformed into a mask of cruelty. I found myself wondering which was my husband’s true face—the kind one he’d worn when he came to bed, or the one he showed me now, of a man who knew he was hurting me, and liked it.

“It’s really unfair, putting your issues on us like that,” Thomas said. “There’s nothing wrong with me and the girls. Nothing. Just because you’re too lazy to do the work on yourself, to try to get better—you can’t put that on us. It isn’t our fault.”

Tears came hot, pricked at the corners of my eyes. “There are reasons for the way I am,” I protested, my voice breaking. “There are reasons. I wasn’t always this way.”

“But you were,” Thomas said. “You were messed up before we ever met. You just hid it from me. I never should have married you. I know that now. I think about it every day.”

“Stop it,” I whispered. “Stop saying these things.”

But he couldn’t be stopped now. “And for you to refuseto get better—not only to refuse, but to actually say that we’re the problem? To threaten to drag us through the mud with you?”

“I’m not threatening anything,” I protested, practically sobbing now. “Just to talk about it, to tell the whole truth for once—”

“Don’t you dare!” Thomas screamed, his face suddenly inches from mine. I cowered back, pressed myself into the headboard of the bed.

“It’s my job to protect this family,” Thomas said. “God knows you won’t do it. So I have to. And if it has to be you I protect this family from, I’ll do it. I’ll do whatever it takes, Rose. The girls, this life, everything I’ve built—I’d kill to protect that, do you hear me?”

I gasped. In all our years of marriage, Thomas had never yelled at me like this, never intimidated me physically, never threatened violence. But here we were. He hadn’t come right out and said what he’d do if I kept pushing him—but I thought he was making himself clear.

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