Mortal Danger

night.
    John insisted the pilot had let his hand slip to Kate’s breast, and he was quietly angry. He sulked for the rest of the evening, but he waited until they got to their hotel room before he detonated the dynamite inside him, accusing Kate of flirting and enjoying the touch of another man. It did no good at all for her to speak rationally to him, and she had bruises blossoming by morning.
    She realized that she couldn’t let John into her American Airlines family; he saw threats to himself in every man in the room. That was the end of the parties she had once enjoyed a great deal.
    It seemed to her that they often worked at cross-purposes. John still attempted to be romantic and gallant, but his timing was all wrong.
    Kate had to fly, however infrequently, to maintain her status with American and to keep her airline benefits for both of them. A cross-country trip with three changes of time zones was exhausting. John didn’t understand that. After he’d been alone for a few days, he thought her home-comings were the perfect time for romance.
    “He’d go out and buy all kinds of deli food and wine, and insist that I eat that salty, fatty stuff and drink the wine,” Kate recalled. “But when I came home from a flight, I was bloated and worn out, and my brain was in another time zone. I wasn’t hungry and I didn’t feel like drinking.He wanted to have sex, and I just longed to get some sleep. John was incapable of recognizing signals about what other people wanted. He did what he wanted. Always.”
    Like all couples who spend years together, traits that once seemed endearing to John and Kate no longer did. In the beginning, John had seemed to Kate to be a man completely in control, stable, and understanding—someone who would care for her. But that side of him dwindled more and more as the years passed. For instance, he would never accept blame for anything that was wrong in their lives or in their relationship.
    “He always had an excuse. In the beginning, it was the pressure of his divorce. Sometimes it was that his blood sugar was low, and he said he had no control over his rages because of that. He had many, many ‘biochemical reasons’ for his moods—and I bought them for a long time. But as I got more educated in the effects of nutrition, I doubted his excuses.
    “Whatever went wrong, it was somebody else’s fault,” Kate remembered with a sigh. “More often than not, it was my fault.”
    Kate just tried harder to please him. She had never been married, and he’d been married to Sue for twenty years. She assumed initially that he knew more about marriage than she did, and she followed his lead.
    “John always expected extra attention,” Kate said. “He’d told me that he expected the woman in his life to be completely loyal and committed to him, and I promised him that I would of course be that kind of partner. I just didn’t realize all that included. When we were out in a restaurant, he expected me to break open his rolls and butterthem for him—because Sue always had. Finally, I told him to butter his own rolls.”
    But when it came to more important requests, Kate appeased John. “It was much easier not to make waves.”
    If she did, John would blame Kate for not being supportive enough of him, and that meant another skirmish that would always be her fault.
    One day, she would have to wonder if giving in to him might save her life—or at least prolong it—but at this point she had no idea what terror lay ahead.
    But that came later. For years, Kate hoped to marry John. Sometimes, she still did—if only to reconnect with the man she once knew. They had been together for almost a decade. Maybe it wasn’t too late. It was 1998, and Christmas was coming. John bought Kate an engagement ring and asked her to set a date to get married. She was hesitant. “I told him, ‘I will marry you if I can find the John that I fell in love with.’”
    “Okay,” John said quickly. “Then that’s who I’m going to be.”
    She hoped that he meant it. “When John was good, he was really good,” Kate remembered. “When he was bad, he was a little bit worse each time.”
    Over their ten years together, Kate left John several times—but never for long. If he couldn’t find her, or get through to her with his blandishments and apologies, he hounded her family, her friends, the people she worked with, calling them at all hours of the day and night, dropping in unexpectedly, demanding to