Eva Mercer

I didn’t think I was being abused.

He never hit me—not in the way I thought counted. He raised his hand butnever made contact. He punched walls. Slammed cabinets beside my head. Threw things. Screamed until I folded into silence. Then, almost like clockwork, he’dcry. Apologize. Wrap his arms around me and call it love.

And for a long time, I believed him.

The abuse didn’t look the way I thought it would. It looked like desperation, like adoration. It looked like jealousy disguised as protection, control disguised as care. He told me I was brilliant—but said I needed to toneit down. He said I was beautiful—but warned me every man was looking at me the wrong way. He told me no one else would love me like he did, and eventually, I believed that too.

Years later, I found myself sobbing on the floor of a secret apartment—one I had rented behind his back. It was less than two miles from the home I was trying to escape. Close enough that it almost felt like I hadn’t left. And in many ways, I hadn’t.

That moment came rushing back to me while watching Little Big Lies.  In the final episode, Celeste sits alone in her own hidden apartment, barely removed from her real life, crying as she wonders how she ended up there. I saw myself in her completely.

Because leaving isn’t always the dramatic rupture we imagine. Sometimes ,it’s a quiet folding. A whispered plan. A small key on a chain, hidden in your purse, close to your chest.

I met him during a fragile chapter in my life. I was a single mother of three, already carrying the weight of previous trauma—an early sexual assault, a painful marriage to an alcoholic. He showed up like an answer. Charming.Funny. Bright.

He told me he wanted to protect me, and I mistook that for safety. He asked me to quit my job and move four hours away from my family. Life would be easier, he promised, if I were closer to him. I believed that too.

Then, slowly, he dismantled me.

He was suspicious of my friends. Then he became my only friend. He told me I was too smart, too sharp—and began softening my edges with guilt. I was“too educated,” “too arrogant,” “too much.” He couldn't celebrate my voice, so he tried to silence it.

He never hit me.

But he twisted my reality until I no longer recognized myself. I shrankto fit the space he allowed me to occupy.

Eventually, the abuse escalated—but in ways I still didn’t know how to name. If I cried, he’d console me. If I yelled back, he’d turn it into sex. He said the fire in me excited him, but needed to be “tempered.” He loved thefight—because it made the reconciliation feel like worship.

It was manipulation. But it was masked as intimacy.

For brief windows of time, I held the illusion of power. He’d tell me I was a goddess. He’d fall apart emotionally, begging for comfort, and I would tend to his wounds. In those fragile hours, I’d ask for what I needed—school, music, small freedoms—and he’d grant them, temporarily.

But the leash was always there.

When he told me to give up on English Literature and major in accounting, it wasn’t about my future. It was about keeping me in a box he could understand. When I started recording music at a local studio, and the owner praised my voice, he grew convinced we were sleeping together. I never finished that record. I never went back.

The final rupture didn’t come in one blow—it came in layers.

It came the night he threw me across the room, and I collapsed on the kitchen floor. It came the next morning when I met a property manager about an apartment and promised to come back with a check.

I was terrified—but I was ready.

And then, like he always did, he found out.

He came crawling up the back stairs of his house—his words, not mine—sobbing. Begging. Promising. “If you stay,” he said, “I’ll change. I just love you too much. That’s all this is. Love.”

He proposed. He had never intended to marry again—but this, he said, would prove his devotion. And I, small and gray and weighing just over a hundred pounds, said yes.

We took our five children and a wedding dress he picked out at night and drove to Gatlinburg, Tennessee. He screamed at me the morning of our wedding, threatened to throw me from a moving car if I didn’t cooperate. Still, I married him.

Still, I hoped.

It didn’t get better.

He grew more paranoid. More possessive. If I took too long at the grocerystore, he accused me of cheating with stock boys. He followed me. Tracked me.  Smothered me.

The breaking point came when he lunged at my daughter.

She was three. She wasn’t his. She was scared of the dark and scared ofhis voice, and when she cried that night while he raged at me, he stormed into her room. I dove between them.

He grabbed his go-bag—always packed, always ready—and walked out. It washis favorite form of punishment. If he couldn’t hurt me with words, he’d hurt me with absence. He knew I was terrified to be alone.

But that night, I prayed he wouldn’t come back.

He did.

He came back drunk. And I made the mistake of telling him I was leaving.

He didn’t cry this time. He didn’t beg.

He raped me.

Afterward, he told me it wasn’t rape. That husbands couldn’t rape their wives. That there was nothing I could do.

Just like when I had called the police months before and they told methere was no abuse—because there were no bruises.

The next morning, I returned to the same property manager. Four months had passed.

She handed me the lease.

“I saved it for you,” she said. “I knew you’d come back.”

She didn’t ask questions. She didn’t have to.

I moved in. Quietly. I never told him where. The apartment was in a part of town he didn’t go. I changed my phone number. I used side streets. I kept my head down. I wanted to finish my degree—I had fought so hard to get there. And I couldn’t let him take that too.

But he found me anyway.

First, my number. Then my door. Then came the flowers. The apologies.

And then, one night, he forced his way in again.

He raped me again.

I escaped to a friend’s house across the street. But he had threatened tokill me—and my children—if I called the cops.

So I didn’t.

Even as he moved on, moved someone new into his home, proposed to her—the abuse didn’t stop. On the day of our divorce, he called me from the parking lot, saying he couldn’t let me go. That night, he showed up drunk and pleading.

But I was done.

I fought him off. Put him in his truck. Sent him on his way.

And for the first time, he didn’t come back.

I want to say I left the moment I realized I was being abused. But that’snot how it happens. I left when I was ready. When I was steady enough to carrythe weight of freedom. When the fear of staying finally outweighed the fear ofbeing alone.

He never hit me.
But he hurt me.
He broke me down.
And I am still building myself back up.

I still over-explain things to my husband, as if I need permission. Istill get triggered by men who look like him. I still feel my body flinch atraised voices or sudden movement.

Healing is not a clean line. It’s a long, crooked road. But I walk itanyway.

Because now, I remember who I was before him—and who I am without him.

I remember the girl who survived rape at eighteen. The woman who walked away from alcoholism and chaos. The mother who shielded her children while absorbing the blows herself.

The strength was never gone.

It was buried.

And once I found it again, I built a life not just of survival—but of sovereignty.

Author’s Note:
I’m sharing this story for anyone who is still inside it. Anyone who’ssecond-guessing their fear, excusing the control, wondering if it “counts” asabuse because the bruises aren’t visible. If you’re secretly planning, quietlysurviving, convincing yourself it’s not “that bad”—this is for you. You don’thave to wait for a bigger reason to leave. Your pain is real. Your storymatters. And your freedom is worth fighting for. If this essay feels close toyour life, please know: you’re not alone. And you are allowed to walkaway—whether your apartment is two miles away or across the country.

You deserve peace. You always have.

— Eva Mercer