Page 16 of Mine to Fear
“I’m sure your opportunity will come,” I said, because that was what he needed to hear. That was what kept the peace.
“When?” he snapped. “When I’m forty? Fifty? When I’ve wasted my whole life waiting for someone to recognize what I could do?”
I served dinner in silence, watching him drink wine we couldn’t afford and complain about people who had achieved what he wanted. It became our nightly routine—him venting his frustrations while I absorbed his anger like a sponge, trying to keep it from overflowing into violence. Some nights I counted my breaths between his words, bracing myself for what might come next.
But it didn’t always work.
The night Anastasia Zarin’s show opened, Dex came home drunk and furious. The gallery was packed, her paintings sold with red dots appearing next to them faster than Andrew could keep track, and Dex was forced to smile and congratulate her while his own work remained unsold in the storage room.
“She sold twelve pieces,” he said, stumbling through our front door at nearly midnight. “Twelve. In one night. Do you know how much money that was?”
I waited up for him, knowing better than to go to bed when he was in that kind of mood. “That’s wonderful for her,” I said carefully.
“Wonderful for her,” he repeated mockingly. “Right. Because mediocrity is rewarded.”
“Dex, maybe we should get you some water?—”
“I don’t want water. I want what she has. I want what everyone else seems to get handed to them while I’m stuck hanging other people’s art and pretending to care about their success.”
He grabbed my wrist then, his fingers wrapping around it like a vise. “Do you know what she said to me tonight? She said she admired my ‘dedication to art.’ My dedication. Like I was some kind of charity case.”
The grip was tight enough to cut off circulation, but I had learned not to cry out when he hurt me. Crying only made things worse.
“I’m sure she meant it as a compliment,” I said.
“Compliment?” he snapped, torment twisting his voice. “You think that’s a compliment? I bust my ass trying to do something real, and all they do is reject my work.”
His grip tightened until I felt my fingers start to tingle. When I looked down, I saw his knuckles had gone white with the force.
“You’re hurting me,” I whispered.
“Good,” he said, and the casual cruelty in his voice was worse than the physical pain. “Maybe now you understand how I feel every day.”
He released me then and stumbled toward the bedroom, leaving me standing in the living room, cradling my wrist and trying not to cry. The bruises took two weeks to fade completely,and I wore long sleeves every time I went out to hide them, even when the weather didn’t justify it.
That was the pattern for months. His failures became my punishments, his disappointments became my pain. I learned to read his moods like weather patterns, to predict when storms were coming and take shelter accordingly. Survival became a skill I practiced daily.
I also learned to lie with stunning creativity.
“I fell down the stairs,” I told Jennifer when she noticed me favoring my left leg after Dex shoved me into our coffee table during an argument about money.
“I walked into a door,” I explained to our neighbor, Mrs. Patterson, when she commented on the bruise around my eye that makeup didn’t quite conceal.
“I’m just clumsy” became my standard response to any concerned questions about cuts, bruises, or the way I started flinching when people moved too quickly around me.
The lies got easier with practice, and that terrified me more than the violence itself. I adapted quickly to a world where truth was dangerous, where honesty could result in broken ribs, black eyes, or nights spent locked in the bathroom while Dex raged outside the door. The faster I adjusted, the further away my old self seemed.
My friends drifted away, one by one. Not all at once, which might have forced me to confront what was happening, but gradually. Canceled dinner plans. Declined invitations. Conversations that grew shorter and less frequent until they stopped altogether.
“You weren’t up for anything anymore,” Jennifer said during what turned out to be our last lunch together. “Every time I asked you to go out, you had an excuse.”
I wanted to tell her the truth—that going out became a minefield of potential triggers for Dex’s jealousy, that stayinghome and keeping him calm had become my full-time job. Instead, I made another excuse and watched one of my last connections to the outside world slip away.
The isolation was intentional on Dex’s part, though I didn’t recognize it at the time. He systematically cut me off from anyone who might have offered support, anyone who might have helped me see that what was happening wasn’t normal or acceptable.
“Your friends didn’t really understand our relationship,” he said after I canceled plans for the third time to avoid one of his moods. “They were jealous of what we had.”
“Why would they be jealous?”
