Mortal Danger

know where she was. She worried about the way he disrupted the lives of people she loved.
    John wouldn’t let her go. He stalked her, phoning her constantly. If he couldn’t find Kate, he called or confronted everyone in her life, making her relatives feel as trapped as she herself did. “He bothered the people I lived with, bothered my family, my friends,” Kate sighed, remembering. “Bother, bother, bother. Call, call, call. He insinuated himself into the lives of everyone I cared about. It got to the point that everyone hated John—except John. He didn’t care about anyone else’s feelings, and he felt he was so much smarter than anyone else. It wasn’t the way to make friends….”
    Whenever he found Kate, he begged her to come home, telling her that he couldn’t live without her. Once, he even showed up at the airport in San Francisco to meet her flight, his smile beaming through the crowds of disembarking passengers. He couldn’t understand why she wasn’t thrilled to see him. Once again, she was mortified at John’s behavior and found herself apologizing to all the people he called when he was desperate to find her.
    “I’d finally decide I had to go back,” Kate said. “I was committed to him—when I think of it, I realize I was probably more married than most women who were legally bound to their husbands. We’d been together almost all the time—we were practically joined at the hip, and he was totally lost by himself. People in Gold Beach assumed we were married, and it was easier to say nothing than to explain what was really unexplainable.”
    John’s jealous moods were exacerbated by his drinking, and Kate attended some AA meetings to see if that would help her deal with him. It didn’t. But her eyes were opening about the futility of trying.
    For years, she’d been living with domestic abuse, butshe hadn’t recognized it fully. She was classically in denial. Kate remembered only her promises to stay with John, and her conscience overrode the emotional battering, the bruises, the stalking, and his rages, which had grown steadily in frequency with every year they’d been together.
    “I always concluded that we should try one more time, and that we should have therapy to try to make our relationship work.” In the end, it still seemed easier for her to return to their little house in Gold Beach to try to work it out between them. She’d been captured in the cycle of violence that thousands of women come to know all too well. Kate lived with guilt over John. “I felt like I had brought this man into the lives of my family and friends, and it was my duty to go back to see if there was a way I could either make the relationship work—which I sincerely doubted—or amicably end it. We had done so much work together, and it was hard to let go of the dream of helping people.”
    As the year turned over to 1999, Kate felt more hope than she’d felt for the past few years. She even wrote to John’s daughters, Tamara and Heather, to tell them that she felt she and John were going to make it after all. It was a new year and, she thought, a new relationship.
    Kate had never thought of herself as a victim of domestic violence. “Those were cases, I believed, involving poor women who were barefoot and pregnant—uneducated. My parents never fought, and for a long time, I was sure that I was doing something wrong, that it was my fault we had so much trouble. And John certainly reinforced that by blaming things on me.”
    She knew now that he was bipolar, and that he swungwildly between euphoria and depression. But he had promised to change. He even moved to an apartment temporarily, and he began seeing a psychologist. John saw the therapist in person, and the doctor consulted with Kate by phone.
    “Charlie, John’s psychologist, warned me not to get John upset,” Kate said. “He told me to ‘just let it go’ if John began to act in a volatile way. I wasn’t to argue with him, because it would just make it worse. That was pretty much the way I’d always reacted to John’s angry moods, so I took his advice.”
    Kate was afraid to ask Charlie what John was capable of if she should speak up for herself. He hadn’t said that appeasing John was for her own safety, but he’d implied it. For the first three weeks of 1999, everything went well. She hoped the pattern would continue; she didn’t want to throw away a relationship that had inspired ten years of trying.
    Their financial