I had a home, money, an isolated location to quarantine — I was safe by every measure. But my partner, who promised to protect me and our children, had disappeared overnight. The people who would have propped me up, fed me, helped with the children — my family and closest friends — could not get to me during lockdown. They wept with me on the phone, but I woke up every day facing the fear and pain on my own.
I decided not to drink, knowing that it would make me sadder, but I also found it hard to eat. Within weeks I had shed 20 pounds, the self I had come to know over two decades of pregnancies and family life.
I also had no information about my husband and why he had left us. After the generic statements about his unhappiness, he gave me nothing — no explanation for what was lacking in our marriage or in me, how long he had felt this way, or even a declaration of feelings for the woman he was seeing. He refused to see a therapist with me. Within a week, he had stopped answering my phone calls. His brother and sister also stopped communicating, saying that to support him, they could not be in contact with me.
Had life been normal, had we been in New York, had I been able to run into him on the street and make him look me in the eye, maybe I would have some understanding of what was happening. But I was on my island, and he was on his, and I knew nothing, only the shock of his disappearance.
Ironically, it had been my husband’s steadiness that made me fall in love with him. We met at a corporate law firm where he was a senior associate, and I was a junior associate assigned to his group in my second year. He was a great lawyer with a quick mind, able to supervise a dozen deals at a time, thoughtful and methodical in his left-handed markups of legal documents. He was tall, blonde and lean, a similar silhouette to my father. He wore suits and rolled up his shirt sleeves as he worked. He was a grown-up.
When he walked into my office, shut the door and kissed me, I was done for. He was intent on marrying me within weeks of that kiss, pledging to take care of me, to step into my dead father’s role as my protector. And we did marry, within the year, both of us (I still believe) very much in love.
