This is part of an ongoing series. Start with Part 1.
Valentine's Day he told me he'd made reservations. A restaurant at the beach, two hours away, dinner that evening.
I was thirty-six weeks pregnant. I had been going to bed by eight o'clock for months. My body had been in some level of pain since week ten and the idea of a two-hour drive each way, at six in the evening, in February, felt like something I simply couldn't do. At 4:30 he texted still waiting. I said I'd be ready when he was. More time passed. He called. I told him I was too tired.
For once, he didn't argue.
That was Valentine's Day.
The next morning I told him I was going to get his things together and he could pick them up after work. That I thought we should part ways.
This turned into the usual — me saying he'd lied to me. About the apps. About Angie. Him calling me names. The long, circular, exhausting thing it always became.
That morning I caught him on Upward again. We argued — the same conversation we'd had a hundred times, going nowhere. At some point it just stopped, the way it always did. He told me to have a good appointment.
Then he sent me a message. A picture, maybe. Something. The backup doesn't show it. I don't know what it was.
That evening we took a bath around 6pm.
We did that most nights — a ritual that had the shape of intimacy without the substance of it. The tub wasn't really meant for two people, and at thirty-six weeks it was feeling extra tight. But he'd settle in front of me, leaning back against my belly, my daughter pressed between us like a fact he kept refusing to fully acknowledge.
I was four weeks from my due date.
I don't know exactly how the conversation got to where it got. The cheating came up — it was always there, just under the surface of everything, waiting. I brought up that I had caught him on apps again. I'd lost count by this point of how many times we'd had this conversation. He went off the way he normally did, turned it back on me immediately — said I was weaponizing sex because I'd turned him down before the bath. I was thirty-six weeks pregnant. I felt terrible. I had been in a lot of pain. He couldn't seem to comprehend that it wasn't about him.
He kept going. Said I was full of shit, said I had no proof, said I was making things up.
And then I said it.
"Maybe I installed an app on your phone."
It wasn't true. I said it the way you say something when you're grasping — not because you believe it but because you want to see what it does. To catch him off balance for once instead of always being the one caught.
Then he attacked me.
He grabbed me by the hair and slammed my head against the back of the tub.
He hit me on the left side of my face. Three times. Four. I lost count — there was a moment where everything went white and I stopped registering details and started just trying to hold on. Then the right side of my head against the tub. He ripped the necklace off my neck. He strangled me.
I was in the bathtub. I was thirty-six weeks pregnant. There was nowhere to go.
Somewhere in the middle of it my brain split the way it had learned to. One half was just inside the moment. The other half was doing math. Thirty-six weeks. Four weeks out. The baby. Don't lose the baby.
Then the pain changed.
Not the pain from him — something different. Lower. Deeper. Excruciating low back pain, the kind that makes you involuntarily scream and gasp for breath. I'd experienced it only once before — the doctors guessed some sort of nerve pain. But now, at thirty-six weeks, it meant something else entirely.
He stopped. Just like that.
He helped me out of the tub. Carefully. Like a different person had walked into the room. He got me to the bed — and then, while I could barely move, while the pain was still rolling through me — he kept saying I better not be faking it. Then decided he needed to check whether I was going into labor.
Eventually the pain subsided enough that I could lie still.
He moved to the couch. Got on his phone. I was in bed alone, which was basically the norm by then. I was pretty sure I had a concussion. I couldn't rest either side of my head on the pillow without the pain sharpening. So I stayed awake. I made myself stay awake. I prayed — not in words exactly, just with everything I had left. Let her be okay. Let me wake up.
At 9pm he texted asking why my car smelled like cinnamon rolls.
He had taken my car to go somewhere. Then asked me to turn the oven on to 400.
I was lying in bed with a concussion. He wanted me to preheat the oven.
At nearly midnight I texted him and asked if he'd bring me more Tylenol.
I told him I didn't feel good.
He asked: "What's wrong?"
I told him my head really hurt.
He asked: "What part?"
I never responded.
We made it to morning.
He got up early for work. I heard him getting dressed and pretended to be asleep. But he came into the bedroom anyway. I don't remember everything about that moment — I remember him looking at my head. I remember something shifting in his face. He said he didn't know he'd done that to me.
Then he left for work.
I went back to sleep. I was in pain and I was crying and I don't think I got out of bed all day.
He called at some point, calm, like things were more or less fine. Kept talking about getting ointment. At around three-thirty he texted that he'd pick some up. A few more texts at five-thirty — normal ones, the kind you send when nothing happened — and then: he got the ointment.
Ointment. For the bruising. For the bright red spots on my head.
Like ointment was really going to cover what he'd done.
My baby shower was 4 days later.
No one knew what happened.
Part 11 — The Destruction, coming next.
If you've ever lain awake alone in the dark making yourself stay awake because you weren't sure what closing your eyes would mean — you are not alone.
The ointment doesn't cancel the injury. The careful hands getting you out of the tub don't cancel the hands that put you there. That's not two different people. That's one person. The whole one.