Stealing Home (Callahan Family #2) - Carrie Aarons Page 0,1

the window; the moonlight casting an eerie backdrop over this unfamiliar room. Throat dry as the Sahara, every limb shaking, I have convinced myself he’ll be standing outside my second-story window in the minute it takes me to turn my eyes to it.

But when I get there, it’s only a tree branch. The most cliché of sounds that go bump in the night, except it’s no wonder why I’m so spooked.

When nowhere, not even your own bedroom or the isolation of your brain, has been a safe space in the last five years, this is what you become. A spineless, petrified shell of a person, not even hanging on to a thread of hope that the scary thing is just a tree branch against the window.

Because I’ve witnessed the monster firsthand, I’ve felt the guttural pain of its wrath and suffered at the hands of all-consuming fear and rage. Last week, while pushing a cart full of two little girls and groceries through the supermarket in our new town, someone dropped a can of corn farther down the aisle. I actually ducked, hid behind the cart, cowering with tears in my eyes. I couldn’t even stand until I’d counted to ten and took deep breaths, determined not to break down in front of my children and a bunch of well-meaning strangers.

It’s been two weeks since my husband’s arrest, since he went to prison and got out on bail the same exact night, and I’ve barely slept a wink. As my girls snooze just down the hall, sharing a room for the first time in their life in a house eight times smaller than the mansion they were brought home to from the hospital, I lie awake in puddles of my own sweat.

I’m convinced Shane, my husband, is going to track us down. That he’ll ignore the restraining order I filed against him and show up on my doorstep. That me, a weak, pitiful version of the woman I once was, will take him back again, even now that the whole world saw what he did to me.

How many times has he come begging back, talking about forgiveness and love and commitment? How many times have I accepted a gentle kiss on the same jaw he nearly dislocated? How many bracelets has he affixed over bruised wrists? How many times has he pulled the “father of my children” card, the girl’s tiny, sad faces filling my mind?

This kind of thinking isn’t uncommon. At least that’s what the therapist who I now visit twice weekly tells me. Victims—it’s still so hard to swallow that word in relation to me—of domestic violence often blame themselves for the breakup of the family. They blame themselves for the abuse because if they were just more perfect, if they could anticipate their partner’s mood better, if they could provide a better life, then he wouldn’t beat me. If I wasn’t so unloveable, then my family would still be together.

Over the last five years, I’ve convinced myself of this. Shane warped my thought-process so much that I found myself, on nights like tonight, wondering how the hell I could put my family through this pain? If I could just be more, do more, then my husband would love me and not hurt me, and our children wouldn’t eventually come from a broken home.

I cling to the three thoughts my therapist, Margaret, and I have come up with to get me out of this negative thought space. Squeezing my eyes shut against the dark and the tree branch scratching the window, I visualize and tick them off on my fingers:

1. A world where my girls have a mother who isn’t terrified all the time;

2. The freedom to do and say as I please, without scrutiny or consequence;

3. And the future that looks any way I want it to, free of Shane’s wrath.

Of course, the doubts creep in as much as I try to push them away. How will I achieve that future? My husband is a star athlete, a famous person who has the love of a million fans on his side. He’s a World Series champion and a beloved member of our town, Packton, Pennsylvania. In our six-year marriage, through the birth of our two daughters, I’ve only seen his clout—and his ego—grow to enormous heights.

The truth is, I never would have left. I put up with the hitting, punching, screaming, controlling, and intense jealousy for so many years; it almost felt second nature now. If Colleen