There were entire nights of my life that simply… didn't exist.
At least, not in my memory.
I would go to bed feeling tired but normal, and wake up feeling like my body had been used, drained of something vital. At first, I told myself it was stress. Marriage was new. Life was changing. Everyone said it was normal.
Jon encouraged that belief.
Whenever I winced in pain or moved too slowly, he would sigh patiently and pull me into his arms.
"You overthink too much," he'd say. "That's your problem."
I learned to doubt myself.
When I suggested going to the hospital, his tone softened but his refusal was firm.
"Doctors will only put ideas in your head," he said. "You're healthy. You don't need strangers poking at you."
So I stopped asking.
But my body never stopped screaming.
Some mornings, I woke with tears already on my face, though I couldn't remember dreaming. Other times, I felt sick for no reason, dizzy, weak, trembling like a leaf even when the room was warm.
Once, I woke to blood on the sheets.
I sat there frozen, staring at it, my mind blank. When I asked Jon, panic creeping into my voice, he frowned slightly annoyed.
"You were rough last night," he said. "You don't remember?"
I didn't.
But I nodded anyway.
The pregnancy test changed everything.
I stared at the two lines for a long time before my knees gave out and I sank to the floor. My hands shook as I pressed them to my stomach. For the first time in months years I felt something close to hope.
A baby.
Maybe this would make things better.
When I told Jon, his reaction was nothing like I imagined.
He didn't smile.
He didn't speak.
He just stared at me.
Something in his eyes frightened me more than any shout ever could.
That night, he didn't give me the drink.
Instead, he sat across from me at the table, watching me quietly, his fingers tapping slowly against the wood.
"You want to know the truth?" he asked.
My heart began to race.
"You want to know why you're always in pain?"
I nodded, my throat too tight to speak.
"I did it," he said calmly. "Every bit of it."
The world tilted.
He told me how he had drugged me. How my weakness wasn't imagined. How the nights I couldn't remember weren't empty. He told me my parents' deaths weren't accidents.
I screamed.
He slapped me.
That was the moment everything shattered.
That was the moment I understood
I had never been asleep.
I had been erased.