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“You didn’t mention all the help I gave you in that story.

Not a single word about your boyfriend, who bankrolled your whole little hobby.

Made it seem like you were self-made, that you did it all on your own.

It’s really so easy to forget me? Has this been your plan all along?

Trick me into spending my hard-earned money on you and then leave me out to dry? ”

I racked my brain for things I had talked about to the Chronicle .

They hadn’t asked where I’d gotten the money for anything.

Money in San Francisco always seemed to appear as if by magic anyway.

There was always a VC or a hedge fund or a rich daddy somewhere behind the scenes.

In this case it was my rich boyfriend. But the reporter hadn’t cared, hadn’t asked.

“You’ve just been using me this entire time,” he spat. His words socked me in the stomach with shame.

“Gray. I haven’t used you for anything. You offered me the money. If you hadn’t given it to me, I would have gotten a loan.”

“With your credit history? With all your student debt? Don’t think I haven’t checked up on you.

Don’t think I don’t know you never would have been able to do that without me.

” He was right and that made me even more ashamed.

I wanted to run. I wanted to put as much distance between the two of us as possible.

I turned and stumbled again over the shoes I’d just taken off and fell to the ground.

He took a step forward and straddled me and then reached down to grab my hair.

The shock of it hurt as much as the strands ripping loose from my scalp.

He yanked me upright so he could stare into my eyes.

“You’d be nothing without me.” His breath was hot on my face and smelled vaguely like liquor, but that was impossible because Gray didn’t drink. He always called it toxic. Said it poisoned the mind, the body, and the soul.

“Say it. Repeat after me,” he snarled.

But I couldn’t open my mouth to speak. I couldn’t manage to get the words out. He shook my entire body until my brain felt like it was jiggling in my skull.

“Say it, whore.”

“I’d be nothing without you,” I croaked.

“Louder.”

“I’d be nothing without you.” I finally met his eyes.

“You would.” Then he let me go, the side of my head and my left eye catching on the corner of his beautiful Shaker coffee table.

I could feel the blood start to pour over my eye.

Gray picked me up again and carried me across the room.

I wanted to scratch out his eyes, but I could hardly see and he was so much stronger than I was.

Still, to this day, I’m ashamed for not fighting back.

He carried me into his bedroom, opened the closet door, and threw me inside.

Before I could even sit up, he slammed the door in front of me.

It was pitch black. A key turned in the lock on the knob outside.

A lock I never knew existed. I was trapped.

That’s when I finally summoned every ounce of strength I had left to bang on the door and scream, but I also knew no one would hear me.

Gray owned the entire building anyway, so even if they heard no one would believe me.

I screamed until my voice went hoarse and my jaw locked, until the blood had dried on my scalp and face.

Eventually I melted into the terror and blacked out from the pain.

When I woke up in the morning I was in Gray’s bed, gently tucked into the blankets. And for the briefest of moments, I thought it was a bad dream. Because how could my sweet and loving, supportive, wonderful boyfriend have attacked me for no reason?

But as I opened my eyes a pain shot through my skull so intense I nearly passed back out. It wasn’t a dream.

“I’m a terrible, broken man,” I heard him whisper.

Gray’s tone came as a surprise, retribution laced with a husky sadness. His cheeks were wet, tears dripping from his eyes. I wanted to murder him, gouge out his glassy pupils with my broken nails. All my rage from the night before came rushing back to me.

“Please forgive me. Please don’t leave me. I made a mistake. So many mistakes. I…There’s something I have to tell you.”

“There’s nothing you can tell me right now that will change anything,” I managed, trying to sit up.

“Let me try. Please let me try.” I went silent, mostly out of fear of what would happen if I didn’t listen, if I tried to move.

“There’s a reason I don’t drink. It’s something my parents never approved of, but I used to experiment here and there with beer and liquor in high school and college with my friends.

The problem was I loved it. I loved it so much because it made me finally feel light and fun and happy.

I had a hard time with that when I was a kid.

I was always working so hard to make my dad happy and live up to what he wanted a man to be.

I never got to relax and let loose. And when I did it, when I drank, I got out of control.

I was loose and happy until I wasn’t. Until I got mad and I blacked out and I didn’t remember anything in the morning.

I turned into a monster. So I stopped. I made the decision that it was something I couldn’t do.

And I was so strong. It’s been a couple years since I had anything to drink, but last night I went out with Marsden and I was crazy over the fact that you hadn’t responded to my texts and he convinced me just to have one drink to relax.

But I can’t have just one drink. I had another and another and another.

I was a disaster. And then Mars saw the article online and he started ribbing me about it.

And he got in my head. He always does. He convinced me you were using me.

Made fun of me. He was all like, ‘Who is the breadwinner now?’ And then I drank more, and I don’t even really know what I did last night.

I don’t remember most of it. I passed out and when I woke up even though I barely remembered it I knew enough to come get you and when I saw you in that closet I wanted to die.

I wanted to kill myself. I knew that I had done it, but it wasn’t me.

I swear to God, I would never hurt you. That wasn’t me.

It wasn’t me. It wasn’t me.” He was trying to convince himself as much as me.

It made no sense and also so much sense.

During our many bedtime conversations he’d told me all about Marsden, about how close they’d been their entire lives, about how Gray’s family practically raised him when Marsden’s mom died in childbirth having her sixth baby.

How talented Marsden was at baseball and how Gray’s own father paid for Marsden to go to the same fancy prep school as Gray, how Mr. Sommers helped charm the college baseball scouts so Marsden would get a scholarship to the same college as Gray.

He’d once even admitted how jealous he was of the affection his own father gave to Marsden, how it made him feel small and how it was one of the things he would talk to Jesus about late into the night as a teenage boy.

I raised my hand to my throbbing head, dreading the moment when I would have to look at my face. I already knew one of my eyes was swollen shut.

I hated Gray for what he’d done, but there was something else inside me, a twinge of sympathy.

Because didn’t I, of all people, know how easy it was to get out of control when drinking?

Hadn’t I blacked out too many times to count in college and woken up filled with shame and regret, naked in some strange guy’s bed?

Hadn’t I lost friends because I’d said something nasty or terrible that never would have come out of my mouth sober?

Didn’t this man deserve some empathy from me after everything he had given me and how he had supported me?

Didn’t he deserve a second chance, at least one more chance?

I wasn’t there yet.

I rolled over and stared out at the multimillion-dollar view of the fog rolling gently over the Golden Gate, a view I would never be able to afford even if I was the best baker in the entire Bay Area.

How ridiculous had I been? Thinking that any of this could be within reach on my own.

I was a poor bastard girl raised on food stamps and hourly wages.

Sure, I’d gotten into a fancy school, but that wasn’t nearly enough to get ahead in this world.

Real power, real success, real money, came from other money.

Generational money. I never would have opened the bakery without Gray.

I would have toiled away at the tech company for ten years to pay off my student loans and all the credit cards I maxed out in college. I would be nothing without him.

I wasn’t ready to decide what to do about Gray yet. I needed rest and I needed the pain to disappear. But I also wasn’t ready to walk out the door, which pretty much meant I’d made my choice.

Looking back, I know that now.

“Leave me alone,” I managed. “Please.”

“Forever?”

“Don’t be dramatic. I need to think.”

“I swear to you it will never happen again.”

“No, it won’t.” I opened my eyes as wide as I could and set my lips in a stern line, despite the fact that it nearly killed me to do both of those things.

When I fell the night before…no…when he threw me on the ground the night before…

the inside of my lip had snagged on a tooth.

It had left a nasty gash in my mouth and the tooth was loose. I knew it would fall out.

“I don’t know what I’m going to decide. It will probably be that I never want to see you ever again.

” I so wanted him to believe that was a possibility.

“But I can’t make up my mind right now. I have to sleep.

Maybe for an entire day, maybe for five.

And that means I need you to do three things for me.

I need you to call the shop and tell them I won’t be in.

Tell them I’m sick. Sound convincing. Then I need you to get me the strongest painkillers you can.

I don’t want Advil. I want Vicodin. I don’t care how you get it.

And then I want you to leave. I want to sleep and I want to heal and I want to think. Can you do those things?”

“I’ll do anything.”

“Also food. Something soft. Soup. Do all of that. Leave the pills outside the door and knock when you have them and then go away.”

It was the most assertive I’d ever been with him.

“I love you,” he said then. He’d never said it before.

No man had ever said it to me. In fact my own mother had never said it to me.

The effect those words had on me was like nothing else.

Maybe it was years of culture telling women that it was the ultimate form of validation, the most important thing for a young girl to strive for.

Those three little words shattered me. Gray gave me an expectant look.

He was a man unused to waiting for anything.

And so that was the one thing I could do. I could make him wait.

“Leave,” I repeated.

“It will never happen again, Rebecca.” He had never called me Bex, which Lizzie called me, or Becky, which was what my mom had always called me.

Not once had he used any of my nicknames and I always thought that was romantic.

Now I know it was about control. He wanted to rename me himself.

Naming something gave you power over it.

“No, it won’t,” I said, and closed my eyes.

“You will never lay a hand on me like that again. And if you do I won’t just break up with you.

Grayson. Look at me.” He cringed when our eyes met and he was forced to take in the extent of the damage he’d done to my face, a face that he had told me was how he imagined the first angels must have looked.

“If you ever hurt me again you will be digging yourself an early grave. Do you hear me?”

He swallowed hard and nodded before leaning down to kiss me on the forehead, then walked out of the room.

An hour later he brought me everything I asked for.

And you know by now that I didn’t leave him.

You can judge me for that all you want. I’ve already judged myself plenty.

But when you’ve been raised like I was, without real love or affection, without any kind of safety net.

When you were raised without hope for any kind of future and then all of a sudden something so much bigger and brighter seems within reach, you keep reaching.

Or at least that’s what I told myself. I also believed that I was a magnet for bad behavior, that maybe I deserved it because there was something deeply wrong with me.

I’d been a curse for my mother. She’d never let me forget it.

Gray didn’t hurt me again for a long time. At least not physically. He found other ways to destroy me over the years, but that was the last time he laid a hand on me until recently.

But he was much more devious and evil than I could ever imagine. Months ago, I discovered the one secret he desperately wanted to keep from me. And when I confronted him with what I’d found out, what he did was worse than that night he locked me in the closet, way worse.

I kept my promise. He did end up in an early grave.