Just Like Her

Chapter 80

[PSA: If you suspect yourself or someone you know to be in an unsafe or unhealthy relationship, please call your local abuse hotline. You're not crazy, and you're certainly not alone.]

Emma

He was wearing the same pale blue shirt he'd worn on the program. He must have shrugged out of the pin-stripped sports jacket he had donned after the cameras had stopped rolling.

I'd remembered him taller, but perhaps dating Thomas had skewed my perception of height as it had skewed my perception on so many other things. Other things that were undoubtedly more important than height, and yet, in that moment it was all I could dwell on.

Patrick had been taller.

He'd towered over me when we stood next to each other. It was infuriating when we argued, but then again we hadn't ever argued much. There was no arguing with Patrick. There was no bloody point.

He was always right, and I was always ignorant of some universal truth apparently obvious to more intelligent minds. Namely Patrick's. More often than not, he thought me stupid and in need of his enlightened intelligence—and the most pathetic part was, that at some point, I'd come to believe it too.

My stomach roiled in remembrance, and I had to swallow several times until the wave of nausea subsided.

It was my fault.

He treated me poorly sure, but I was the one who had taken it. I let him treat me that way. Trisha—before we stopped speaking—had taken pains to frequently point out what she perceived to be commonalities between patterns of abuse and Patrick's behavior. But it hadn't been abuse. I mean it can't be abuse if you let it happen, can it?

And I did. I chose to pick my battles and avoid arguments. I accepted broken apology after broken apology and heard myself giving in to his ridiculous demands, even if when it meant moving in with him before I thought I was ready and losing contact with my friends.

Patrick never hit me, nor did he ever threaten to. Sure, he had a temper, but who doesn't?

Not Papa.

I closed my eyes momentarily and breathed in through my wet nose.

Not Tom.

My eyes flew open as the two thoughts collided in my mind.

I loved them both dearly, in different ways of course. And they both loved me—again, differently but similarly in the ways that mattered: neither of them pressured me into doing things I didn't feel comfortable doing and, for some reason, they both seemed to endlessly believe in me and my writing.

They never made me feel afraid or stupid or worthless.

And they sure as hell never humiliated me on national television in the name of self-promotion.

My fingers rolled into tight fists as renewed rage thronged through my veins—for the interview, but more acutely for every single time he made me feel the need to cower, to bite my tongue, and to sacrifice my personhood for the betterment of his fragile ego. 

Yes, I stayed with Patrick longer than I should have. But I got out.

The night I left, Patrick punched a hole in the wall. I can't remember what got in him so livid—perhaps the skirt I wore had been too short—but I can remember the dawning of realization that the next time Patrick lost his temper, it wouldn't just be the wall needing to be fixed up.

It'd be me.

So that I night I decided to nod along with his apology like I had so many times before. I cleaned up the mess, and when he went off to the pub I sat on the couch and watched the clock for a quarter of an hour. When I was sure he was gone, I gathered up all my things that I could carry in my satchel. It hadn't been much—my wallet and computer, a dress, some toothpaste and a comb—but they were mine.