If you and I met at one of our children's birthday parties, in the hallway at work, or at a neighbor's barbecue, you'd never guess my secret: that as a young woman I fell in love with and married a man who beat me regularly and nearly killed me. Or love’s biggest chimera: how hard it was to finally let go of someone whose love I valued almost more than my own life.
We all have secrets we don't reveal the first time we cross paths with others. This is mine.

I met Conor on the New York City subway, heading downtown, 20 years ago. I was 22. I remember it like it was yesterday. I fell in love with him, married him, loved him although he was too troubled to ever love me back. And after four long, excruciating years together, when it came time to choose him or me, it was surprisingly hard to choose myself.

The last time I saw Conor was the sunny June day of our mutual graduation from business school. In my mailbox, I found a tattered manila envelope. It was empty. I turned it over.
On the back, a note was scribbled in black ballpoint, along with a stick figure of a little boy like a kindergartener would draw for his mom. Above the note Conor had written my maiden name, instead of the name I’d taken when we’d married.

Good Bye Retard –

I wish you all the best.
Sorry we didn’t make it together.
I’ll always think of you.

Conor

I cried there in the darkened b-school hallway, alone. Those five lines made for the shortest, saddest good-bye ever. My tears splashed on the orangey manila paper.
We’d come here together, embittered but still a couple, less than two years before. How could it be that I planned to depart alone, Conor a cipher I feared passing on the street? In a few weeks, I would move out of the apartment we’d lived in together. I’d start a new job, a new life, hundreds of miles from Conor, with an unlisted phone number and a post office box instead of a published address, on the same day I turned 27. As alone as I’d ever been.
I kept walking on the campus pathway until I got to the dean’s crowded cocktail party, silly-drunk classmates spilling out of the flagstone courtyard. I could see the footbridge where a few months before I’d screamed at Conor until I thought my screams would tear me apart. Surrounded by friends, I sipped a club soda and scanned the crowd of my fellow MBAs, all of us poised to scatter in different directions to seek whatever the future held.
Across the sea of graduates, I glimpsed the back of Conor’s blonde head above a knot of people talking together. My heart seized.

He didn’t see me. He was wearing the same navy blue Brooks Brothers sport coat he wore on that magical spring day only four years before, when we picnicked at the Museum and later made love for the first time. I clenched my jaw and looked down at the butterfly ring from Mom on my wedding finger. Tried to breathe.
I had to look at him one more time. It would probably be the last time I saw my husband, my supposed soul mate, the man who almost killed me.He held a drink in his hand. There was a blonde woman standing at his side, a woman I did not recognize from our class. As I watched, he rested his hand possessively on her slim waist and she leaned in toward him. Conor moved his head closer and his lips brushed her smooth golden hair in a caress that paralyzed the muscles in my face.

It was impossible to break my gaze. I could tell by the way his head moved that Conor was laughing. I could practically hear his strong, confident laugh ring out across the courtyard, just as it had that night at P.J. Clarke’s in New York when I’d started to fall in love with him.

Finally, I looked away. I took off my glasses, so that he’d get lost in the blur of classmates in the crowd.
Good-bye, Conor.
I never saw him again.

Conor stands too close to me in a square, shadowy room. His face glows like a candle in the dark. Thick wheat-colored hair, freckles across his nose. People always said we seemed more like brother and sister than husband and wife. His eyes search mine.
Conor doesn’t care that I have three young children whom I love in exactly the way I used to adore him: without demanding anything but love in return. I can feel Conor’s certainty that what he wants trumps the devastation his actions will wreak upon my marriage, my kids, my life. I don’t resist when he starts kissing me.

I wake with a start, sickened, lying next to my husband in our warm bed.

It takes a minute to realize I am safe, behind locked doors in an old house in one of the most crowded cities in the United States. Sheltered by our blue down quilt, my head deep in a pillow that covers a menagerie of Beanie Babies, ear plugs and cough drops. My husband’s breath comes in rhythmic whooshes like waves on a beach. I’ve been safe for years.

Trying to shake off the nightmare, I slip from the warm bed and tiptoe into my daughters’ room, the polished wood floor cold beneath my bare feet. Next door in the darkness our boy sleeps on the bottom bunk, sprawled sidewise, clutching the basketball he holds all night in lieu of a stuffed animal. One of the girls stirs in her narrow bed. Even when she was an infant, a profusion of strawberry blonde ringlets surrounded her tiny, heart-shaped face. Her red hair was a surprising and welcome resurgence of my charismatic, auburn-headed grandmother Frankie, dead from alcoholism almost 25 years now.

I slide into the rocker between the twin beds and softly glide back and forth, listening to my daughters breathing, my husband snoring. To distract myself, I review message points for a television interview I have to give the next day about stay-at-home moms who return to full-time work after years raising children. The neighbor’s automatic sprinkler comes to life, whirring like a dentist’s drill in the yard out back.

Two floors below me, in our dusty boiler room, there is a small cardboard box that’s been duct-taped shut for over 20 years. The box holds fragments of my life with Conor, once-precious objects I can’t consign to 100 years of biodegradation amidst the East Coast’s cigarette butts, old lawnmowers and dirty diapers. Our wedding album, bound with creamy, sweet smelling leather. An envelope with several black and white pictures of five-year-old Conor and his grandparents that I found after I no longer had an address to send them to. Still in Frankie’s silver frame but with only a few shards of glass left is the wedding photo he broke over my head the last time he beat me. On top of the stack lies my folded wedding veil, the lace probably yellow and brittle by now. I kept Conor’s resume from our first date. Another piece of paper is there too – the permanent Family Court restraining order against him dated four years later.
For a long time after I left Conor, I struggled with why and how had I lost my self to someone whom I was intelligent enough to see was bad for me. Why was it so difficult to leave, to reject someone whose love came close to destroying me? I kept silent during cocktail party debates about why people stay in toxic relationships. I walked away after the inevitable pronouncement that people who can’t let go of abusive love are weak, uneducated, self-destructive, powerless.
I fit none of those stereotypes. I never met anyone who did.
I paid for loving Conor. For years I lived with an unlisted phone number and took my mail at a post office box. I sold our house at a 40% loss. It took me almost a decade to settle both our graduate school debts. The first day of every new job, I’ve had to explain to the company’s security staff that I have a crazy ex in my life, and that if he were ever to show up looking for me, the police should be called. Every man I’ve been on more than two dates with, I’ve felt the obligation to confess my past. There are a few friends and relatives I don’t plan to ever trust again, based on comments that suggested the abuse I endured was my fault.
I don’t imagine I will unpack that cardboard box in my basement very often. But I can’t deny that our story is part of me, my life, who I am. It’s taken me years to understand the particular, dangerous chink in my self-esteem that let Conor slip in. But in one profound way I was lucky: while still in my 20s, I learned to spot – and stay away from – abusive romance.

Some people don’t learn from their mistakes. Most don’t get second chances in life. I was able to marry again, to raise children with a stable, loving man, and to pursue a career that has given me financial freedom and professional rewards beyond my childhood dreams.
Conor is gone. He may appear in my dreams every few years, but he’ll never have power over me again. I don’t regret loving him. But I’m happy to bury our past in a corner of my basement, next to the furnace, where it belongs.

Bestselling author Leslie Morgan Steiner is a contributor to EXaholics.com