She wanted to believe he was different than the man he turned out to be.
            “A man who puts his hands around your throat is lethal. Even if he lets go. Even if it isn’t a full squeeze. Even if he promises never to do it again,” the speaker explained. “Whatever else happens next, those fingers around your neck mean you’re at greater risk of being murdered. Strangulation, even for a moment, is a leading predictor of eventual domestic homicide.”
            Eloise stared at the black circle on the sheet in front of her as she listened. She sat at the end of a rectangular table in a cold room of an old building. Across from her, other women were looking at the paper with a big black circle, the cycle of violence. She caught an older woman’s eyes and forced a smile and looked down again. It was the seventh of eight weekly meetings.
            Three days before she would face him in court, Eloise sat around a table with mothers and wives and girlfriends and daughters and listened to their stories.
            An older woman was afraid to be on her own again after all these years. A younger woman beside her was fresh faced and had four children. On the other side, an even younger woman with faded clothes had been evicted from her home and her children had been taken away. Some of these women were mandated to be in this meeting. Others, like Eloise, chose to be. Eloise pulled a piece from each woman’s story trying to find common ground. But she felt alone.
            It had been a quick and fiery passion, an intoxicating sexual craving, and it felt like it might be love. Every encounter quickly became entangled flesh, and what felt like spiritual fire. He removed her clothing as she walked through the door. He made her laugh. He cooked culinary masterpieces. He wooed her with poetry. Dense missives that felt over the top. I want you, he said. My days are gray without you. He needed her, she belonged somewhere. He said he would be her forever-love.
            She was so hungry for love. She had lived a quiet life, moving books from carts to shelves, following simple routines. He felt electrifying and unpredictable.
            There was a wildness about him. His black hair never seemed to settle on his head. Sometimes he ran naked through the woods. Or so he said. She never knew what was real, never knew what to believe. Somewhere between fantasy and illusion, she never found her footing.
            When he told her about his painful childhood, tears welled in his eyes, and her heart melted at his vulnerability. After all, she was an eater of stories. Meager scraps she gobbled as if trying to break a too long fast. She wanted to fill his life with the love he never had. His relationships didn’t work out, he said, because all the women before her were crazy. She would be the special one to melt his heart and take that coveted place beside him.
            And so, when he announced that autumn was the season for rut, when deer mated furiously in the woods around their rural community, and he too had needs, she transformed herself into the muse for his desire. She gave in when he demanded she rise at dawn to listen to hours of his thoughts. She turned this into love. When his need for her to be available to him meant she had to stop seeing her friends, even walking her dog with a companion, this too she turned into love.
            Her magic grew as she transformed coercion into love in her mind. Words of cruelty, piercing depths she couldn’t fathom, were forgotten when he came up behind her in the kitchen, where she was working endlessly on imperfect meals to please him. He entered her from behind. Ecstasy. The intoxicating smell of him was a release from the criticism and commands, and in these moments, a union, a forgetting. A brief release from the spell of his anger.
            Soon dark nights were the norm. He kept her from sleeping with explosive outbursts. Long phone calls. Streams of texts. Pushed off the bed. Spit on in the hallway. Shoved in the dining room. Smacked in the head by the couch. And finally, choked.
            When his hands went around her throat, longing to silence her forever, she finally made a report. There it was on paper: an accusation. There was no denying it now. She had a temporary restraining order and would soon make it permanent. She feared it wouldn’t stop him.
            Eloise finished telling her story to the women’s group. As she looked at the women around the table, she saw sympathetic faces nodding.
            But when Eloise went home that evening, the hair raised on her neck. She could see him at the edge of the woods, watching her. In the dusky light, his silhouette became one with the dark figures of thin birch trees in the distance. She watched his figure fade away until she wasn’t sure if she had even seen him at all.
           

Two.
The accusation   

            In two days, Eloise would testify in court to get a restraining order. She visited her lawyer. The lawyer warned that this was the most dangerous time for a woman, trying to restrain a man who needed to be in control.
            Recently, a man in a nearby apartment had shot and killed his wife of 25 years before shooting himself, only seven days after the woman had filed a restraining order.
            Eloise knew he had guns. Early on, he’d made sure to show her where he kept his weapons. He kept them unlocked. It added a little something to those moments of his volatility. When he was feeling especially dark, he would point to a gold bullet on his dresser and tell her he was saving it for something special.
            The first time she had met her lawyer, Eloise’s hesitancy was clear to everyone in the office. The lawyer spoke bluntly, then left the room. She came back with a stack of police reports. As Eloise flipped through the papers, she came upon a woman staring back at her with a black eye and a square jaw. The woman’s eyes were tired but determined.
            Eloise heard her heart thumping in her ears. She recognized the woman’s name. He had described her as just a friend. In the woman’s statement to police, she had been his lover for years and he had broken more bones than she cared to remember. And yet, she had dropped the protection order.
            There were years of women filing, then dropping, protection orders in those records. He had gotten to them, wooed them, or intimidated them into letting the whole thing go. Her stomach turned when she saw his face in the mugshot. Eloise wasn’t crazy after all. She sat up straight in her chair, energized.
            One statement from a former girlfriend reported that he had been offered a batterer’s program as in exchange for avoiding jailtime. And it was in that program that he polished the art of manipulation. His charisma, the softness of his voice, his ability to make himself the victim in every story, and his wounded vulnerability was a study in salesmanship. No matter that he had dragged that girlfriend across the house by her hair on Christmas morning. In this program, he mastered the therapeutic vocabulary. He became so well-liked he convinced one counselor to quit his job, leave his wife and kids, date someone half his age, and become a sheep rancher.
            “The lunatics are running the asylum,” Eloise’s lawyer said, when she read this. “He’s what we call a master manipulator. He’d have a cult if he could.”
            Another statement claimed he had left a woman in the ocean. He pushed her out of their small boat after a drunken argument. She had to yell for help until a nearby craft came to the rescue. And yet that same woman would later claim he would never hurt her. Always he was forgiven. By family, by friends, by lovers: people felt easier being in his good graces.
            On paper he was a demon who could break your heart and shatter your soul. Women said the bruises didn’t hurt as much as his vicious words, calculated to inflict the most harm possible. He would poke a nerve until a person was exhausted and ready to burst. Then he recorded them reacting to his torment. With these videos he forced alibis, blackmailed lovers into submission. Restraining orders were dropped.
            Eloise told her lawyer he enjoyed watching her react. He would speed on the highway and swerve in and out of traffic, while watching her, threatening to push her out. At home, he created an emotional rollercoaster until she was so tired, she very nearly gave up. The sound of his truck in the driveway alone would put her into fight or flight mode. She never knew who would be walking through the door, the sweet, soft voiced lover or the black-eyed demon.
“When you love someone, you tell them everything!” she cried. She had told him too much about her vulnerabilities, her mistakes, her fears, her desires. She had given him the rawest parts of her, the secrets that feel safe to share in love. Then he used her vulnerabilities against her in arguments. He poked. He prodded. He manipulated until she was hysterical, reactive.
            Once, after shoving her and spitting her, he laughed and recorded her as she kicked a bowl of cat food in frustration. When she screamed in response to his relentless insults, he said she had anger issues. No one would believe she was a victim now, he vowed. When she sobbed, he told her she had mental problems and was disgusting, from her smell to her vagina to her brain, she was an ugly fat troll, a pile of skin and bones nobody wanted. He would drive her to suicide or a mental hospital, he said, and he didn’t care which.
Sometimes, alone in the shower, or driving through the countryside alone, she would fantasize about him being smashed by a giant sledgehammer, just gone in an instant like whack-a-mole. But then he would smooth things over, let her hope again. This time will be different. But it never was. It was worse.
            The women in the reports shared her experience. They were strangers to Elois, yet she felt something for them. The scaffolding that held her denial together was swaying for a final time. So many women, all sharing the same story, as if they were dolls, one replacing the other. She left the office and cried in her car, resting her head on the steering wheel. And when she could cry no more, she became angry and squeezed the wheel. With the anger she felt stronger.
            When she returned home that night, he was there again, that dark figure, standing so still in the distance. He was making himself seen, making it known that no boundary would hold.
            She checked her phone for a text. Nothing.
            Looking out the window she could just make out her reflection in the eerie orange embers of a dwindling sun. From a distance, she could hear coyotes yipping. Song dogs, native peoples called them. Solitary creatures connected by their songs. When song dogs sing, the stillness of the night comes alive. Anything seems possible.
            She locked the door and kept the light on, falling asleep hours later with her phone in her hand. As she slept, the screen flashed with an unknown number. Bitch … I meant what I said.

One.
Judgment                        

One day before the court date, she opened the front door to a bouquet of flowers. A note that simply said You were my sun. Now it seems my sun has set. As if the last texts were forgotten. She couldn’t prove who sent the flowers or the texts. She doubted anyone would care.
            No one had ever sent her flowers but him. The sweet scent reminded her of being in bed together. Part of her wanted to say that she’d drop it all. Ask him to forgive her, to restore peace. She was tired of worrying about his next move. For a moment she wondered if it was her fault after all. She remembered the fingers on her throat. The look in his eyes.
            If she followed through, the restraining order would be in his file. Every other woman had dropped it. She would be the one who stood up to him.
But it would be the end of everything. He would be so cruel to her in court. He had vowed to humiliate her, expose every embarrassing thing she’d shared, put it in the record, tell everyone about the things he had made her do. Show the videos.
            Eloise spent the day making her decision. She crept out of the apartment as the sun set.
            She would be out late. Since he knew where she was, she decided the safest place for her was out in the world among others. The people who needed to remember would remember her being there, though they would think little of it at the time. Slipping out of the bar quietly, she drove by his house, idling her car to make sure his truck was there. She knew where he was too.
            A light was on in his bedroom.
            She waited.
            Her fingers traced the scar above her eye from when he threw a glass at her head. He told her she brought nothing to the table. That she was worthless and pathetic. She thought about the way he had made fun of her sounds during sex. The criticism of anything she cooked. The way he would sneak up on her just to hear her yelp in surprise. The softness of his mouth. His head in her lap. His musky smell that she couldn’t get enough of. The coldness of his rage under the surface. The way he sounded when he screamed.
            Eloise put the car in park. His light went out. The night was alive. She was ready.

Zero.
No sign of life

In the morning, she passed through the metal detector at the Superior Court. She sat in the waiting room looking down at her hands. She scraped a bit of muck off her coat. When she glanced up at the sound of voices coming down the hall, his lawyer was glaring at her. But when the bailiff called them in and the judge entered and everyone stood, he still wasn’t there.
            “No sign of life,” her lawyer shrugged after speaking to his lawyer. “Time’s up. The court isn’t going to wait for him.”
            When it was her turn, Eloise spoke softly. “He said I don’t deserve to live,” she looked at the judge. “He said he would kill me. He put his hands around my throat.”
            In the defendant’s absence, the court issued a default judgment in favor of the plaintiff and a restraining order, renewable in five years. Court was dismissed.
            There would be no humiliation, no record of intimate details, of mistakes, of love, of anything.
            No need to return in five years. It was done in every way. There was no one waiting for her outside the court. He wasn’t hiding behind her car. No messages on her phone, no angry voicemails. There would be no more women making reports. And there would never be flowers again.
            After the hearing, Eloise drove the roads of their small town in a daze. Soon she was splashing through enormous puddles, bumping along wooded country backroads, driving just to drive. She saw the deer in the road only at the last moment.
            With a horrifying crunch, her car swerved, and she pulled over to the side. She ran to kneel by the animal, slow breaths coming from its mangled body. Vegetation was violently disturbed. Seven large black birds had scattered from the hedgerow at the sound of the sudden collision.
Gravel rubbed into her knees as she stroked the deer’s throat. A familiar look of panic flashed in the creature’s eyes as it struggled to move its broken neck.
He hadn’t expected she would come to him. Or that she might sneak up behind him and make him yelp in surprise. But his violent love reminded her what it was to be wild.
            “I’m sorry,” she pleaded, with her hand on the animal.
            The deer laid its head down for the final time.
            “You never saw me coming, did you love?” Eloise said.

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Jennifer Molidor is a writer, victim’s advocate, and environmental activist. Her writing is published in The Hill, The Guardian and USA Today and she has been interviewed for Mother Jones, Politico and Bloomberg News.