Page 15 of Mine to Fear
“Admit it,” he said, his fingers digging into my arm now. “Admit that you settled for me.”
“I didn’t settle for anything. I chose you.”
“Liar.”
He shook me then, just once, but hard enough to make my teeth click together. I looked into his face and saw something that terrified me—not just anger, but a kind of desperate rage that seemed capable of anything.
“You’re hurting me,” I whispered.
For a moment, I thought he might not stop. I saw something flicker across his features that looked almost like enjoyment. Then, abruptly, he released me and stepped back.
“I’m sorry,” he said immediately, but this time the apology sounded different. More practiced. Less sincere. “I didn’t mean to grab you. I just—I hated feeling like I was already losing you.”
I rubbed my arm where his fingers had left red marks that would fade into bruises by morning. “You are not losing me. But you can’t put your hands on me like that.”
“I know. You’re right. I’m sorry.”
As I got ready for bed that night, I caught sight of myself in the bathroom mirror and saw something that made my stomach drop. The red marks on my arm were clearly visible—finger-shaped impressions that darkened overnight.
I stared at my reflection and tried to remember when I became the kind of woman who made excuses for a man who left marks on her body. When I started accepting apologies for things that were supposed to be unforgivable.
The answer was simple and devastating: the moment I decided that being chosen by the wrong person was better than not being chosen at all.
Standing there in our bathroom, looking at the evidence of what my relationship was becoming, I finally understood what Jude saw that I missed—what my brother’s instincts picked up on that first night when he watched Dex perform his charm like a carefully rehearsed act.
I touched my swollen lip from that night’s beating, the one that was so much worse than anything that came before, and realized I had been living this story for two years. Two years of escalation, of boundaries crossed and redrawn, of apologies that meant less and less each time they were offered.
I knew, even then, that my brother was right about everything.
But knowing and acting were two different things, and I was too afraid of being alone to choose freedom over the familiar prison I built with a man who promised to love me and delivered something else entirely.
6WILLA
The car came to a halt,and somewhere in the distance I heard someone calling my name, but I couldn’t make out the words through the fog settling over my mind. Sounds blurred together—voices, footsteps, the dull ringing in my ears—until nothing felt distinct anymore. I didn’t understand what was happening to me, only that everything hurt and nothing felt real.
Was it bad? Was I dying?
Jude. Oh, Jude.I should have listened to him. He had seen right through Dex from the very beginning, tried to warn me, and I had been too stubborn and too desperate to hear him.
And Kieran…God, Kieran. I should have told him I never stopped loving him. I should have been brave enough to fight for what we had instead of running toward the first man who made me feel wanted, even if it was only an illusion.
But those realizations came too late, didn’t they? My consciousness kept slipping away, loosening its grip, pulling me back into the memories that had led me here. Back to the year when the trap slowly, methodically closed around me, until escape no longer seemed possible.
Over the next year, Dex’s drinking increased alongside his failures in the art world. Each rejection, each bad review, each lost client resulted in me paying the price when he came home. I became an expert at concealing bruises with makeup, at making excuses for why I couldn’t meet friends, at walking on eggshells around a man who once made me feel like the most important person in his world. What frightened me most was how ordinary it all began to feel, as if this new version of my life had quietly rewritten the rules while I wasn’t looking.
The progression was so gradual that I almost missed it happening. After the first slap, there were three weeks of perfect behavior. After the arm-grabbing incident, it was two weeks. Then ten days. Then less than a week between episodes, until I found myself living in a constant state of hypervigilance, never knowing what might set him off. I started measuring time not in dates or seasons, but in the space between apologies.
It started with his gallery job. Andrew Winslow—no relation to my old name, just a cruel coincidence—was the gallery owner who hired Dex part-time to help with installations and customer service. For six months, it was steady work that helped pay our bills and gave Dex exposure to the art world he was desperate to break into. I clung to that period as proof that things could still be normal, that we were only going through a rough patch.
Then Andrew hired a new artist for a solo show, Anastasia Zarin, a twenty-six-year-old painter whose abstract landscapes sold faster than the gallery could hang them. She was everything Dex wanted to be—young, successful, critically acclaimed, financially secure from her art alone.
“She’s not even that good,” Dex said one night after coming home from work, the smell of alcohol already heavy on his breath. “Her technique is sloppy. She just painted pretty colors and called it deep.”
I made dinner, putting together pasta and the vegetables I’d picked up earlier. “Maybe people connect with her work because it makes them feel something,” I suggested carefully, keeping my eyes on the stove.
“Feel something,” he repeated, his voice dripping with disdain. “You mean feel good about themselves for buying something expensive and trendy.”
The bitterness in his voice worsened over the months. Every success story he encountered at the gallery became a personal affront—evidence of a world conspiring against his talent.
