I remember the exact moment everything cracked open.
It was 2017. I was driving home, sobbing. Not just crying—sobbing, like my soul was trying to claw its way out. My hands gripped the wheel like it was the only thing tethering me to this world. I WAS SCREAMING.
I didn’t want to go home. I never wanted to be home.
Because home wasn’t safe.
Because I wasn’t safe—not from him, not from them, and not from myself.
I hated my life.
I hated who I had become.
The shame.
The masking.
The fake smiles.
The bruises you couldn’t see.
The ones you could.
The performance of a happy life we were all miserable in.
Cameron was out of control, and how could I blame him? He was the only one BRAVE ENOUGH to call it what it was—a nightmare.
Michael? Off doing whatever (and whoever) he was always lying about.
Nikita was locked away, gone behind closed doors, trying to escape.
Mia, my sweet Mia, was wrapped up in softball and girls scouts and just floating through the chaos like it didn’t exist….she had been spared the physical abuse.
And me?
I was disappearing.
Shrinking.
Masking the truth so well, even I had started to believe the lie.
But in that car, on that drive, I snapped awake.
I realized with horror—I CAN’T FUCKING DO THIS ANYMORE!!!
I had become my mother.
The silence. The suffering. The survival.
THIS HAD TO END
I knew leaving wouldn’t be easy….He told me he would make my life a living hell. I thought, it already had been. It got worse.
I knew exposing the truth would come at a cost.
But staying?
Staying was already killing me.
So I pulled the plug.
Twelve years. Gone.
And that was just the beginning…
Not of freedom, not yet.
But of the unraveling.
Of the truth.
Of becoming me.