He Read My Emails From the Trash Folder
Why the download is called 'Slow Cooker Favourites' — and who it's really for
“Who were you actually with?” he asks.
In a blink of memory, I’m there. Standing in the lightless hallway, having just closed the oak front door of our country cottage, my swimming bag hooked over one shoulder, my hair still damp. He’s been waiting for me to return to the house. He’s working from home all the time now, so he can keep an eye on my movements.
“What do you mean? I was swimming. There’s chlorine in my hair. Smell my hair.”
I’ve started swimming three times a week to lose the baby weight. To start feeling better about myself, to counter all the ways he grinds me down.
“Easy to fake,” he says.
I want to get past him, into the kitchen, put my costume in soak. But he’s blocking the doorway.
“Fake how?” I ask. “You think I paid to get into the leisure centre, dipped my head in the pool, and then went and met someone?”
“There you go. You’ve just admitted how it’s done.”
“What? No! That’s not—”
“I know what you’re up to. I know what happened in Cambridge.”
A chill travels the length of my spine. But no. He’s faking. He has to be. He’s trying to trick me into a confession. No way he could know about that. Unless—
“I’ve read your emails,” he says.
The emails I deleted. Definitely deleted before emptying the Trash folder. And it wasn’t like he had my password, either, no way he could have guessed it and got into my account.
So I thought. But I was wrong.
What I did in Cambridge was have a one-night stand. My life was sexless and joyless. A grind of childcare and housework I hadn’t agreed to. Refusing pleasureless sex with a man who now physically repulsed me was the only tiny bit of control I’d retained in a relationship where everything that mattered to me had been stripped away.
Sex was one of those things. I was thirty-two. My high libido had nowhere to go. A desire for pleasure couldn’t be met by the impotent, beer-bellied, chain-smoking ghoul who had tricked me into being his servant.
He’d said he’d kill me if I left, and I believed him. But his treatment of me left me ever-more hungry for love, and its physical placeholder, sex. I was ravenous for someone to treat me with respect, or care about my pleasure. But he’d moved us to the country, where I couldn’t meet men. Where I was never without the kids that he’d lied me into having. A place where everyone knew your business.
The final summer I was with him, an old English teacher of mine got a residency at a Cambridge College. We’d been emailing to and fro for a while, after I’d sent him some poems: I was trying to get my writing off the ground again, after eight years.
“Come and see me for the day,” he said. “We’ll talk poetry and go punting. I can get you a room overnight at the college, dinner with the Fellows.” After years of brain-numbing housewifery, it sounded like bliss. But I knew, one hundred per cent, that Walter wouldn’t let me get away if I told him. It had to be secret. So I arranged a weekend for me and the kids at my Mum’s house in Colchester, just forty miles from Cambridge. And then asked my Mum would she be alright to look after the kids for 24 hours, but please not tell Walter, because he gets so jealous. She agreed.
[*Walter’s name has been changed to protect the innocent (me).]
That night in Cambridge, after pass-the-port, Old Teach and I went clubbing. Expressly so I could find a young man to share the room he had booked in my name. We’d been talking all day about my miserable life, and the sex I wasn’t having. The pleasure I surely deserved. So he took me out to scout for a man who was willing.
And we found him. A PhD student with a climber’s body and an appealingly shy way about him, who seemed happy to serve. I’d laid out the conditions: no strings, first names only. It was just a rare treat, like a pineapple Danish. Followed by a cuddle, and a sleep in his arms, and then gone.
This was what Walter now knew, from hacking into my hard drive.
When you delete a file and empty the trash — I found out that day — your data can still be recovered. It’s still there on the drive, at least until that part of the drive is needed for storage and rewritten. My ex and I were both programmers, yes, but all my nous was in the coding. I never got into the architecture underneath. But clearly, he could, and did.
Coercive controllers keep tabs on you any way they can. They’ll track your phone and your car, set up hidden cameras, install keylogging software to steal your passwords. So any help or relief you seek carries risk. Which is why the PDF I made — Is This Abuse: A Pattern Recognition Guide For Women Who Aren’t Sure — downloads with a filename of ‘Slow Cooker Favourites’.
You can store that pretty safely on your hard drive without it being opened. It contains eight different behaviour types with checklists, to help you be certain that no, it’s not you; no, you’re not overreacting. If you check it out, make sure to erase your browser history after.
Paid subscribers can get it free at the bottom of this page, to keep for yourself or pass to a friend. Anyone who might be slowly waking up from the slow, mad misery of coercive control.
I have a different husband now. He started as a friend-with-benefits and proved good in the sack. He’s a goof who makes me laugh. He learned to cook, and he’s amazing; he makes dinner every night like my own private chef. He does the laundry and food shop. He raised our daughter while I worked, and he’s the kind of man who will drive a hundred miles to help someone in need.
My ex called me a whore. Told our kids I was a whore. But I know now how faithful I can be. I know the value of a man who makes me happy, does his share, and treats me with respect.
Men who control women are weak-ass men. Threatened by clever and capable women, they try to prove their masculinity to other men through trophy-hunting and dominance. They hook into vulnerabilities our childhoods left. They leverage the insecurities that a patriarchal culture started weaving into our fabric from the moment we were born.
But we are waking up. We know our worth, and cannot be controlled.
If you’re new here, hi! Yes, I’m an award-winning novelist and a writer with non-fiction bylines in the Guardian and New York Times, but I’m also an Advanced (Level 3) EFT Practitioner with 18 years’ experience of working with one-to-one clients and small groups. And many other things besides.
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This month’s EFT Tapping session for paid subscribers is “Tapping Out What Abuse Left Behind.”
If you’ve had an abusive relationship in your past, whether with a partner or a parent, you’ll know it leaves a residue: a lack of trust, specific triggers and vulnerabilities.
If you’d like to make a start on clearing out of your system, bringing a deep sense of peace and relief, join me on Zoom next Thursday, 25th June at 6 pm BST. Register here.
This is also the place for paid subscribers to grab your calendar link for all our EFT sessions and “Cuppa with Ros” dates for the rest of the year!
Now back to the glorious powers of words…
Read Why I Stole Your Life, the “Booker-worthy” fictional autobiography of the real-life soldier and pirate Mary Read
This week’s free chapter:
You Will Learn Nothing Good From Mister Dryden
The wealthy Mrs Read has been tricked into thinking that Mary is her legitimate grandson, Mark. Now installed in Mrs Read’s London household, she must maintain her disguise.
Over to you:
Silly questions are good questions.
Serious questions are also good questions.
Or just share your own experiences. It helps all of us know we were never alone. We are legion.
More people have come to my list because of being abused than any other reason.
SUGGEST: insert at top of file actual recipes... genuine content is thus five (or ten) pages down and not seen when file first opens
It felt like I was reliving a part of my life. I stayed for 25 years before getting out. At the end, I too had an affair, (3 years of no sex) and because of that "He won". I was the bad guy, the villain in his story. And I don't care. Let him call me the bad guy... because I am out..