Page 41

Gray was many things, many terrible things.

He had hurt me physically that one terrible time all those years ago, back in San Francisco.

But he had managed to redeem himself for a while after that.

It was when I started making money to support us that he got mean again.

That’s when he began verbally cutting me to the bone.

He’d told me I was worthless, that I would be nothing without his help, without his money.

He had even dangled my failure to have children in front of me more than once, saying I never would have been able to conceive if it weren’t for him and Dr. Carmichael.

But he was projecting his own weaknesses on me.

I’d rationalized all of this away by reminding myself of the financial stress he was under.

And every time he was wicked to me, he found a way to make up for it.

He would flip a switch and be gentle and kind for months on end, helping with the kids even though I could tell they drove him insane and he hated being with them for more than an hour at a time.

He’d buy me presents we couldn’t afford.

He’d build a new porch swing so I could watch the sunset from my favorite spot in the house.

I grew so used to the highs and the lows that they seemed normal to me.

I was such a fool. It got harder to rationalize the more recent abuses.

He never touched me hard enough to leave marks, but on two occasions he slipped something into my drink that made me practically comatose.

He told the kids and the staff that “Mommy needed a little break,” while he kept me practically paralyzed with drugs and taunted me during my few waking moments by telling me he’d take my children away from me and have me committed to a mental hospital.

He’d open my social media and read me the most hateful comments on my posts, things I’d learned years ago never to read.

“You’re a fraud.”

“Your kids must hate you.”

The first time I came out of my drugged haze, I truly believed I was simply exhausted. Six kids! A multimedia business! A fucking farm to run! But the second time he did it, I knew in my bones something was wrong, and I stopped accepting food and drinks from him.

I kept going through my husband’s emails, slowly piecing together the extent of the deceptions. Gray eventually relented and gave in to Dr. Carmichael, who was very persuasive.

“You’ll never have children any other way,” the good doctor wrote. “And how will that look?”

So Gray turned to the man he respected the most, the one whom he loved like a brother, and he asked him the most egregious of favors. This didn’t take place on email. I would have been even more surprised if it did, so I never saw the exact exchange with Marsden. I had to imagine it.

In my mind I conjured Marsden’s initial hesitation but puffed-up pride that Gray would be forced to even ask him for such a thing.

I pictured Marsden enjoying the power this gave him over my husband, over the real son of the man he idolized as his father figure.

At some point he must have agreed because appointments were made and when I looked at my own calendar I saw they lined up with my IUI schedule.

IUI was explained to me very carefully when we first started out.

It was a process where the doctor washes a sperm sample and then uses a thin catheter to inject millions of healthy sperm into the uterus at the time of ovulation.

It was different from IVF. We wouldn’t be creating an embryo, which was what the church considered a sin.

Dr. Carmichael simply substituted Marsden’s sperm for my husband’s, and I was kept completely in the dark.

I never questioned Alice’s strawberry-blond hair, which came from neither of our families.

Genetics can be so strange, I thought. And I’d never met my mother’s parents or my own father, so what did I know?

I never questioned anything about my perfect, gorgeous babies.

I felt blessed. I felt saved. Gray and the church elders made sure of that.

They attributed our little miracles to prayer and the fact that we lived our lives in service to Jesus Christ. We were good. We were chosen.

Once I got my first baby, I felt that same new comfort of protection like the time Gray rescued me from my apartment after the break-in. I was cared for.

Looking back, it explains so much. Why Marsden was the first person to visit us after the birth. After all the births. He literally wanted to see the fruit of his loins.

Why Gray was eventually so insistent on the home births with only Dr. Carmichael and a midwife present. He wanted to keep all our medical information as private as possible. He didn’t want a record at the hospital of the children’s blood types because it could prove he wasn’t their father.

It also explained why Marsden took such an intense interest in our kids when he had absolutely zero interest in me. I don’t think Marsden ever asked me a single question about myself or even truly looked me in the eye.

Thousands of lies and half-truths. We have six children and none of them are biologically related to my husband.

And five of them are related to Marsden. Because James, our bonus baby, was a surprise. We didn’t do any IUI fertility treatments to have James. At the time he was a miracle.

Once I learned the truth about what Gray and Marsden and Dr. Carmichael had done, I remembered Gray’s intense surprise that I was able to get pregnant with James.

But he must have attributed it to God’s grace.

He must have believed that he was cured.

But he still never touched that baby if he could help it.

We slept in separate bedrooms by then. Had perfunctory sex once a month.

It was after James that we started the #WhoopieWithYourSchmoopie challenge to make it seem like we were doing it all the time.

I think we maybe slept together one or two times, but Grayson was into it because it made him seem like a stud and the church was very keen on promoting marital relations.

When I got pregnant with James, I just assumed that so many healthy births had somehow healed me of the problems that had plagued me for so long. I didn’t think about the timing of the MomBomb 2019 conference and a night I spent with a certain single dad.

My children may not belong to my husband, but they are mine.

That became even more true after the revelations.

Those children were mine and mine alone.

Marsden was nothing. He was a means to an end.

An anonymous sperm donor. As I read those emails, as I looked at the genetic results, I made the decision that I would take complete control of their lives.

I would finally be the mother they needed, the one who took agency over their futures, because they deserved better.

It was then that I finally said yes to all the deals I had turned down because Gray didn’t approve of them.

He didn’t want me to do a cookbook or release a magazine with my face on it or star in a television show.

He was fine with the money coming in if it wasn’t obvious that I was running the show, if it was contained on the small screens of people’s phones.

Then we could all still pretend it was just a lucrative hobby.

He wouldn’t have to feel less than for not making as much money as I did.

Once I made big deals with major media brands, all the figures would be public. People would know what I was worth.

I told Olivia we could finally go big. I channeled the energy I’d had fourteen years earlier when I wanted to be the biggest bakery franchise in the Bay Area.

It was okay to want it all. It was okay to think outside the box.

Gray’s lies and obfuscations gave me the permission I needed to go against him.

I didn’t confront him right away. I made all my plans first and I told no one but Olivia.

I had to tell someone, and she was my best option.

I had no real friends, no family to speak of.

I longed to confide in Lizzie, but she was gone.

I spoke to her in my head sometimes. Long conversations where I bared my soul and begged her for forgiveness.

My children’s paternity wasn’t the only thing I discovered in Gray’s emails.

I discovered filthy love letters he sent to Veronica, hundreds of them over the years.

I remember the first time I saw you in church. I couldn’t stop staring at your shiny braids. I wanted to yank on them, use them to pull you into me, wrap them around my hands as I devoured your luscious lips.

But now I need to pay for my sins. For coveting you all those years ago.

Now I want you to own me. I want you to possess me. Pin me down. Make me squirm. Tell me when I’m allowed to orgasm.

I tried to remember when Veronica moved to town and did the math. My stomach twisted and curled. She must have been ten when Gray first saw her in church. That was one of the tamest emails.

He’d sent them late at night, probably while lying in bed next to me.

I’d seen him scrolling her Instagram feed hungrily when he thought I wasn’t watching. He was obsessed with his friend’s wife. Gray had always wanted what Marsden had and vice versa.

I never expected Gray to cheat on me, but I wouldn’t have put it past him and frankly I didn’t care.

His interest in sex with me had waned over the years.

I had looked at his computer’s browser history once before because I was curious about what kind of porn he watched.

There were two extremes. The most boring vanilla sex MILF videos with women old enough to be his grandmother, and then intense female dominatrix videos where men were tied to a bed and degraded and humiliated verbally, but never touched.

This all tracked with his emails to Veronica.