My Husband Destroyed the Kitchen Camera Before the Police Arrived — He Never Knew My Late Father Had Built It to Keep a Copy

I had thought, during those months, that I was functioning well — that I was strong, composed, strategic, holding it together.

And I was, on the surface.

But underneath the surface, every hour of every day, some ancient part of my brain had been standing guard, braced, scanning, certain that the danger could return at any moment, because the danger was still legally free and still legally my husband and still, for much of that time, sleeping in my house.

You cannot rest, truly rest, while your body believes it is being hunted, and mine had believed exactly that, correctly, for the better part of a year.

I had been sleeping in twenty-minute fragments, waking at every sound, my heart already racing before my eyes opened, listening for a footstep that had learned to mean pain.