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times.
     
    Darlene sat with me at one point. “Are you all right?”
     
    “I’m so tired,” I admitted. “Not just tired physically, though Lord knows that’s a very real thing right now. I’m tired in my heart. I don’t understand why Eric won’t let me go.”
     
    “It’s a threat to his manhood, honey. The fact that you left him.”
     
    “He doesn’t care about me,” I said. “He cares that I left him. It’s a blow to his pride. You’re absolutely right.” I put my head in my hands. The pain in my arms was exquisite—it was difficult to lift a tray, so I had to carry plates to tables to at a time. I couldn’t handle more than that. I had painkillers at home, so I could at least count on the pain going away long enough to let me sleep.
     
    “You were right to leave him,” Darlene reminded me. It was like she could hear my thoughts.
     
    “Sometimes I wonder,” I said. “Isn’t that sick? Sometimes I wonder if it was the right decision. I mean, he hurt me, yes. But it was nothing I couldn’t handle. I should have grown a thicker skin.”
     
    “No way,” Darlene said, rubbing my back. “I’ve known a lot of women in your position, Kara. And let me tell you, they don’t wake up one day and decide not to do it anymore. It escalates, in fact. Tell me. Did he start off hitting you?”
     
    “No,” I admitted. “It was all verbal for a long time.”
     
    “Right. Then he moved on to physical violence. And I bet that got worse over time, too, right?”
     
    I only nodded.
     
    “Oh, honey, you did the right thing. For you and your daughter. Who knows when he would have turned on her?”
     
    “I can’t even think about that,” I said, shaking my head. It wasn’t like I never had. I’d carried the image in my heart—made-up, thank God—of Eric hurting Emma. It was one of the only reasons I found the strength to leave him, the thought that he would hurt her one day.
     
    “So stop blaming yourself. This is all his fault. And I bet he’s nothing but a lot of talk.”
     
    “That’s where you’re wrong,” I said with a rueful smile. “He means every word he says. He’s determined to make my life a living hell. He’ll take away the one thing that ever mattered to me. He wants to drag me through the dirt, make me wish I’d never been so stupid as to leave him. Really, I wish I’d never been so stupid as to marry him. God, what was I thinking?”
     
    “If you hadn’t, you wouldn’t have Emma. She’s a great kid.” Darlene smiled.
     
    “Yeah, you’re right.” I smiled, too. Just the thought of my spunky, willful, whip-smart little girl was enough to make me feel a little better. Like there would be a good outcome to the situation. I had to adopt a little bit of the hope she ran around with. The endless hope of children.
     
    By the time five o’clock rolled around, all I wanted was a hot foot bath and something for the pain. I couldn’t take it until Emma went to school, though, since it would make me loopy. The thought of getting back home after driving her there was all that got me through as I drove home, my sore arms making it difficult to turn the wheel.
     
    Why had I married him? It was a question which plagued me night and day during the worst times of my marriage, and again in the days just after my leaving. Why had I married him? Did I have any pride? Or was it that I didn’t think I could do any better? The thought was sobering and sad, and probably very close to the truth. I’d always been what the boys thought of as “cute,” but I was the good friend. I wasn’t tall or willowy. Back then, that had been the ideal body. In the ten years that had passed since the painful days of high school, a new body standard had come to pass: the curvy girl. My day had come.
     
    Not that I was ever fat. I was petite, large busted, with a thick butt. No matter how hard I worked out, how little food I ate, I couldn’t change my basic body type. Boys didn’t pay