Chapter 3: The Charmer
Content note: This chapter deals with emotional abuse, domestic violence, and suicide attempt. Please read with care for your heart.
CHAPTER THREE
By the time I met Brian, I had lived a hundred lives in the body of one woman.
I was 44 years old, working as the manager of the South Broadway Cultural Center in Albuquerque — a job I genuinely loved. I’d returned to New Mexico at 32, not to be near family, but to be near landscape. The mountains and mesas of my childhood — the ones that took me in when no one else did — had always felt like the only things on earth that wanted to keep me alive. Later, after I died and returned to this world, I would understand them as living spirits. Back then, I just knew I needed to raise my soon-to-be-born son somewhere that felt… sacred.
I would have been too cynical to call it that at the time. But I felt it.
By then, I’d earned a bachelor's degree from Berklee College of Music, a master’s from Columbia University in journalism. I put myself through school working as a health club manager, dance instructor, and saxophonist in salsa and merengue bands. After Columbia, I had three job offers: The Miami Herald, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and The Boston Globe. I became the youngest staff writer The Globe had ever hired, writing features for the Living/Arts section.
Before returning to New Mexico, I’d spent nearly a decade writing for the Boston Globe and the LA Times. I’d won national awards, been named the top newspaper magazine essayist in the country at 28. I thought I had made it. I quit newspapers, wrote my first novel, and it sold — not just sold, but exploded. Time magazine put me on the cover and called me "The Latina Terry McMillan." My book was optioned for film by a major studio with Jennifer Lopez attached. Tom Wolfe named me Writer-in-Residence at his alma mater. The United States Congress gave me an award. We bought a big, new house. Paid cash for two Lexuses.
But it didn’t last.
Albuquerque — like my father — had a way of punishing people who tried to shine too brightly. My career began to dim, and so did my marriage. My husband’s ego withered under the heat of my rising star. He cheated for two years and left me for a woman who would never outshine him.
The pain of losing the one person I thought was my family was... unspeakable.
And it happened in Albuquerque — that cursed town — where no dream survived intact.
I spiraled.
I struggled to write another hit.
Book after book after book — published, but fading.
A dozen novels, and still somehow a one-hit wonder.
Meanwhile, the economy crashed.
The Lexuses were repossessed.
The house was lost.
The marriage ended.
I needed work.
New Mexico isn’t generous with second chances, and it certainly wasn’t a newspaper town. I couldn’t leave; shared custody kept me anchored to the desert.
Eventually, I found work managing the South Broadway Cultural Center.
It was a good job — meaningful, creative, connected to the community.
I raised revenue by 33% within months. I was proud of that work.
But emotionally, I was frayed.
I had no conscious understanding yet of my patterns.
I didn’t know the map of my own trauma.
And trauma?
Trauma is patient.
It waits. Quietly, in your nervous system.
It sends out beacons you can’t see.
Until you heal yourself, it draws people who will force you to reenact everything that hurt you the first time.
At a department-wide meeting for Cultural Services, trauma found me again — this time with a sweet face, a chiseled jaw, and a devastating smile.
Brian.
He was younger, managed another facility — the trendy Rail Yards. He looked safe. He was soft-spoken, funny, thoughtful. Handsome enough that women raised their eyebrows when he started talking to me.
He flirted.
He listened.
He asked about my son like it mattered.
He seemed safe enough to fall for.
And for almost a year, he was.
Until he moved in.
And everything changed.
The drinking. The drug use.
Maybe it had always been there, hidden under clean clothes and expensive shoes.
Now it was constant.
The criticism crept in, like mold under paint.
Nothing I said was right.
Nothing I did was enough.
He chipped away at me methodically — until I no longer recognized myself in the mirror.
All that listening he'd done during courtship?
He’d been building a map of my soul — and now he was using it to hurt me.
He would text insults while we sat together on the couch, watching movies with my son.
Fat. Disgusting. Embarrassing.
When I started crying, he’d shrug at my son and say,
"Your mom’s acting unstable again."
He showed me naked photos of his ex-girlfriends, told me they were hotter than me.
He blamed me when he lost his job.
Punched walls.
Then objects.
Then me.
He choked me.
More than once.
And somehow — I stayed.
Because I was still the girl who believed that if I could just time the dinner right, the glares would stop.
That if I became small enough, invisible enough, good enough —
someone would finally stay.
Easter Sunday, 2015.
We were supposed to go to his family's house.
Instead, like so many narcissists, Brian picked a fight — because no day of joy could shine brighter than him.
He spent the morning telling me how much hotter the women were on Instagram.
Younger. Slimmer. Better.
I cried.
I begged him to stop.
He didn’t.
He enjoyed seeing me fall apart.
It was there in his face — that glint of satisfaction, like a boy pulling wings off a butterfly just to see what happens.
I felt hollow.
Not sad. Not angry. Just numb.
My book career was over, he told me.
(It wasn’t.)
I was too old to find love again, he said.
(I wasn’t.)
He convinced me I was fat, ugly, old, stupid, a failure, unlovable — and that he had been my last chance at a real life.
And I believed him.
Most of all, I just wanted the pain to stop.
In the kitchen where he once baked me a lemon cake for my birthday, I poured nine times the fatal dose of Lamictal into my hand.
And swallowed it.
The pills hit fast.
I tried to make myself vomit — toothbrush down my throat, desperate.
But it was too late.
Then the convulsions came.
Lamictal is called the "Exorcist Pill" for a reason. In overdose, it sends the body into violent seizures. I couldn’t control my limbs. I couldn’t speak properly. I was falling apart in real time.
I begged Brian to call 911.
I told him I didn’t want to die.
I was pleading for my life.
He laughed.
Told me I was embarrassing myself.
Told me to shut up before the neighbors heard.
Eventually he said,
"Fine. If you can walk to the car on your own, I'll take you to the hospital. Prove it."
I tried. I tried to prove I was worth saving.
I clung to him, body jerking, mouth slurring.
He kept laughing, calling me an idiot.
We made it two steps out the front door.
Then I collapsed.
💔💔💔 No human should ever have to go through that. 😢
I hope that asshole gets his comeuppance.