“Eventually, I actually grew to view his infidelity as sort of a blessing. Because I hated him so much, and if he was out having sex with some random person, at least he wasn’t in the house with me. I know how selfish that sounds, because I really did feel sorry for every woman who crossed paths with him. And that was even before I learned from Vanessa how bad it had been for Allison. And for each of you, I assume.” She paused for a moment, and I could tell she felt the weight of responsibility, even though it wasn’t her burden to carry.
“He did everything he could to make me feel worthless, like I wouldn’t be able to survive if I left him. I did try, or at least, I started to try, a few times. At first, he said he’d make sure I was financially destitute. When that didn’t deter me, he leveled up, saying he’d prove that I was unhinged; he even got all these prescriptions for me that I didn’t really use and said he’d claim that I was abusing them and have me institutionalized. And finally, his favorite threat—that he’d kill me and get away with it because he’d make it look like a suicide.” Isabel pursed her lips sadly. “Maybe I should have tried harder, or just left in the middle of the night or something. But his threats didn’t just feel real. I knew him well enough to know they absolutely were real.”
She looked down as if she were embarrassed. “I know what you’re thinking,” she said, though really, even I didn’t know what I was thinking—not if I’d had to name just one thing. I could tell the others were as dumbfounded as I was. “You’re wondering why the hell I didn’t run screaming from him right at the start.”
All right. Yes. That was certainly one of the things I was thinking.
“For one thing, he somehow kept the genie in the bottle for the first few years that we were together. The devil in the bottle. Whatever. And we got married so young. I had such high hopes for us. In retrospect, I see that I married him because everyone else thought he was amazing. Everyone always told me how lucky I was. But I knew it wasn’t right between us. Even before he started hitting me, I knew that there was something essential missing in him—an empathy chip. I came to realize he genuinely doesn’t see other people as people.
“I fought it, that realization. And continued to make excuses for him. To tell myself I was lucky to have this lavish life. It’s scary what you can convince yourself of when you’re trying to avoid reality.” She shuddered. “But when I met him, he was everything I’d thought I wanted in my husband since I was a child. He was tall and handsome and smart and driven, and I knew he’d be successful.” She shook her head again. “I know how pathetic that sounds. I just . . . I guess I didn’t grow up in time to make the choice I should have made.
“Within less than a year after we were married, I’d completely lost myself. He didn’t want me to work or have friends. He just wanted me to stay home and look pretty and keep our apartment in perfect order. The first time he hit me, we’d been married about six months, and it was because I was in a hurry to get somewhere so I put his dry cleaning back in his closet with the plastic still on.”
We all looked at Isabel. My arms were covered in goose bumps, and my fingers were white knuckling the stem of my empty wineglass.
“That time was just a slap. It got worse, quickly. And that stuff came before I even found out about the cheating, so when I did, it almost seemed like the lesser of my problems. There was a ripped thong in his jacket pocket one day . . . I confronted him about it and he didn’t even bother denying it. He basically just told me not to worry about it, that what he did outside our marriage didn’t concern me.” She shook her head in disbelief at her own reality. “I felt like I couldn’t tell anyone. For a long time, I even pretended to my mom that everything was fine, because she so badly wanted me to be happy, and I wanted to give that to her. But she didn’t believe me, and so for several years, I had to distance myself from even her. To protect her from the awful truth. He preferred not having her around, anyway. But finally, I couldn’t do that anymore, and I let her in.”
I interrupted her, accidentally, when she brought up her mom. “What about your mom?” I blurted. “I mean, right now. She’s probably worried sick. Is there a way of telling her you’re okay without—”
“My mom is in on all of this, obviously!” Isabel seemed appalled that I would think her capable of distressing her mother. “I would never do that to her.”