By the time I realized that his rules were becoming a cage around my life, I was already locked deep inside the bars without a key. Then he decided to hire a young woman named Skylar Fox to be his personal assistant at the office.
He claimed that she was a harmless addition to the staff while she was actually loud and hungry for the status that Jensen loved to flaunt. Within a few short weeks, her name became his excuse for every late night and every mysterious hotel charge that appeared on our accounts.
He stopped touching me entirely and treated me as if I were a problem from his past that he was waiting to discard. When I found out that I was expecting a child, I foolishly thought that I could fix our broken bond with the power of unconditional love.
I prepared a special dinner and placed the ultrasound photo in a beautiful envelope right next to his gold rimmed plate. For a single second, I saw a flicker of the gentle man I had married as he looked at the black and white image of our child.
He asked if it was a baby and I whispered that we were having a little girl who would surely change our lives for the better. He simply took a large bite of his food and remarked that he hoped she got my looks because his superior genes were wasted on a future housewife.
He never reached out to touch my belly or asked me how I was feeling during those long and difficult months of pregnancy. The moment that finally shattered my heart for good happened outside a local restaurant while the rain fell in a steady rhythm.
I walked out of my doctor’s appointment and saw Jensen’s luxury sedan parked across the street near a large window. I watched him laugh with Skylar as he fed her a bite of dessert with a look of pure adoration on his face.
Then he reached across the table and placed his hand on her stomach in a slow and tender circle that he had never offered to me. Skylar was also pregnant and it was clear that Jensen was saving all of his tenderness for a woman who was not his wife.
That night he came home in a drunken stupor and told me that he wanted a completely different life after the child was born. When I asked him where I would go with a newborn baby, he laughed and told me that I had nothing because he controlled every aspect of our world.