Then he was yelling more, and I realized that he was drinking quite a lot. He’d hide the bottles at the bottom of the trash can outside so I wouldn’t see them. He’d been avoiding me in the evenings, holing up in his study by himself, and I realized that it was because he was drinking down there.
I tried to bring it up with him—gently—and he got really mad and told me to stop being such a prude. He said he liked to relax with a drink at night, and that I shouldn’t be complaining about him taking out the trash. Did I want him to just leave it all for me to do?
I sort of saw through those excuses, but I also didn’t want to badger him about his drinking if he wasn’t ready to talk about it. You can’t make people accept that they have a problem, you know? They have to come to it themselves.
But, unfortunately, I guess he took that as the all-clear to just drink in front of me. And he was not nice when he drank. We’d just gotten married when he really started to let loose—that’s probably why he let loose, come to think of it—and I was a little baffled about how to handle it all. And I felt like I’d been a bit of an idiot. I knew he had a problem when we got married. I’d gone in clear-eyed about it.
But then the violence started.
At first, it was throwing glasses at walls and taking out his anger on stuff around the house. Then it was me. Slapping and pulling my hair and shoving me into walls. He was always yelling at me about how I’d hit him too, how it was my fault too, and I was just like … what are you talking about? I haven’t touched you.
Ben:???????????????To be clear, he was hitting you—abusing you—but telling you that you were hitting him?
Julia:??????????????Yes. Constantly. The next morning, I’d say, if you ever slap me like that again I’m leaving you, and he’d go, you slapped me back, you have no room to talk. Which never happened.
Ben:???????????????What was his response when you told him that?
Julia:??????????????Sometimes he’d look genuinely confused. Like he really had thought that we’d been going nine rounds instead of him just … it was only him. I wondered if maybe he was so drunk that he didn’t remember what happened, so he was just saying that.
Ben:???????????????Did you ever feel safe telling anyone about this?
Julia:??????????????My mom. I’d edit it a little, try to make it sound not so bad because I didn’t want her to worry. But I definitely didn’t want to tell anyone in Plumpton. They were all so crazy about Matt. And I worried he’d tell them all that I’d hit him too, even though it wasn’t true.
The thing is … this is probably really weird, but the person I most wanted to talk to was Lucy Chase.
Ben:???????????????Even though you’d never met her?
Julia:??????????????Yeah. And that’s weird, right? No second wife wants to talk to the first wife. Especially a first wife who has been accused of murder. But I wanted to know if their marriage had been the same, because Matt talked about her so … kindly.
Ben:???????????????I’m sorry, kindly?
Julia:??????????????Yeah. It was one of the things I liked about him at first, actually. I’ve never liked men who speak badly of their exes. It usually feels a bit misogynistic to me.
Matt actually seemed sort of sad when he talked about Lucy. He said she was sweet and kind and he felt bad that she had to leave the town she loved. He openly told me he still loved her, but that they just couldn’t be together anymore. He said that he hoped she was happy.
Ben:???????????????Did you ask why they got divorced, then? If he still loved her?
Julia:??????????????I did, and he said that she left him, which is true, I think. He said that it was all just too much for her, being in Plumpton after Savvy’s murder. But, of course, later I wondered if it was because he’d been hitting her too.
And I wondered if it was just me. Maybe he’d been so devastated by that divorce that he started drinking, and he changed. That’s why I wanted to talk to her. But I didn’t reach out, of course. That would have been too weird.
Ben:???????????????You’ve met her just today, though, haven’t you?
Julia:??????????????Yes. I met her today, by chance. I didn’t ask, though. I wanted to, but it’s not my place. I could tell that she didn’t … Well, she has enough problems. She doesn’t need mine too.
Ben:???????????????How long did the abuse go on with Matt before you left?
Julia:??????????????Only about six months. It ramped up really slowly, and so there was only about half a year of me going, am I really doing this? Is this my life? How have I wandered into this abused-wife narrative? It almost felt unreal. I think I might have left earlier, had I not been so confused about how I ended up in that situation.