“Alex,” he wheezed, rubbing his ribs, “if your future husband ever pisses you off, he better have trauma surgeons on speed dial.”

After graduation I became a combat instructor at the downtown community sports center. Five days a week with at-risk youth. The kids called me Coach. Nobody there saw me as a victim.

I once silenced a riotous room of gang-affiliated teenagers by throwing their loudest enforcer to the mat seven times running. On the seventh, wiping a bloody nose, he looked up and muttered, “Respect, Coach.”

Tom Miller knew none of this.

He didn’t know the docile, quiet girl he thought he was marrying spent forty hours a week teaching people how to snap limbs. He never asked about my job past the title sports center employee.

He assumed I stamped memberships at a reception desk. Christine had sized me up — petite, soft-spoken — and decided I was prime raw material for a domestic servant.