Chapter 22: Elee leaves

Elee was the one who decided to leave. But she had nowhere to go and no way to support herself. She had lived in the U.S. for nearly eight years, yet she still struggled with the language. Sometimes her phrases didn’t quite make sense. But that day, when she left, her meaning was painfully clear.

I had invited Johnetta over, thinking maybe she could help us—help me—figure things out. It was a strange decision. What did Johnetta know about counseling couples? She wasn’t a therapist. She wasn’t an expert in relationships. Maybe I just needed someone else in the room, someone to make sense of the unraveling. But she didn’t help. She made it worse.

Elee and I hadn’t been communicating for months. The silence had grown heavy between us, like a thick fog that neither of us could push through. I wasn’t sure she cared about the marriage anymore. Maybe I had stopped caring, too, though the thought felt dangerous. Then Johnetta asked the question that tore it all open.

“Do you love her?”

The air between us cracked. I hesitated, feeling the weight of the moment press down on me. Love—what did that even mean anymore? After everything? After the fights, the silence, the exhaustion? I exhaled, the truth slipping out before I could stop it.

“I don’t think I do.”

Elee’s face was unreadable. Maybe she already knew. Maybe she had been waiting to hear it out loud. But Johnetta? She reacted like I had set fire to the room. And before I even understood what was happening, Elee was being taken away.

Looking back, I should have seen it coming.

Elee had a hair-trigger temper. She could go from calm to screaming in seconds, her anger erupting in waves. She had thrown things. Broken things. Even slapped me, once, early in our marriage. The shock of it had sent me reeling. I slapped her back. Not out of malice, but out of instinct, out of a lifetime of being struck first.

I hadn’t wanted her arrested. I hadn’t wanted to be the villain. But I also couldn’t hide behind locked doors in my own home, couldn’t relive the fear I thought I had left behind with my mother’s hands.

What was the right response to being hit? To the sudden sting of skin against skin, the reminder that violence could be casual, instinctual? I knew the rules. She was a woman. I was a man. I was supposed to take it. Walk away. Be better. But I had spent my whole life being struck without fighting back—by my parents, by Ana, by the system itself. Only in nightmares had I fought back.

And then there was the other thing. The other violation. Elee’s hands, grabbing me where I did not want to be touched, as if my body belonged to her. I had told her—stop. Over and over, I told her. But she never listened.

So many times, I had to sit with a pillow covering up my lap.

And that day, when Johnetta sat there, pretending she could help us, none of that came up. I didn’t want to embarrass Elee too much.

Elee had heard the words: I don’t think I love you. And to be honest, I was too disoriented by every way that Johnetta was confronting me. Johnetta ws doing the literal opposite of what a couple's counselor would do. She was escalating the situation.

The argument escalated. I tried to tell Johnetta about Elee’s mood swings, about how she screamed, about the things she threw when she was angry. Elee fired back, pointing at the door I had kicked once in frustration, as if that made us equal. As if we were the same.

Then she said it: She needed protection.

Johnetta soon decided that the place to take Elee that day was to the domestic violence shelter.

I knew that Elee meant that she was an alone woman in the area and that she would be vulnerable without a place to stay.

She came back, the next day, a piece of paper in her hands. The wheel of domestic violence. A diagram of power, control, coercion. She hardly acknowledged that she had the paper in her hand.

I stared at it, the words blurring together. Who had controlled who? I had let her dictate our life, our choices, my own self-worth shrinking under her certainty. But now, in the eyes of strangers, I was the oppressor.

Then came the restraining order. I wasn’t to go near her. The irony was, I hadn’t even known where she was.

Still, she came back. She wanted to talk. Wanted me to know she was in Durham now.

Johnetta was there, concerned for me. “You could get in trouble,” she warned.

Trouble. As if I hadn’t already been humiliated enough, standing in court, listening as they painted me as a threat. As if my presence alone was dangerous.

And then, the truth surfaced.

Elee admitted that when she arrived at the domestic violence shelter, they ran my name. My record—tainted. A charge from years ago, misfiled, made me look like a criminal. Even something as absurd as misreading an ID had been twisted into an accusation of corrupting a minor.

She said the Compass Center told her she could qualify for housing—if she had been a victim of domestic violence.

I stared at her, the realization settling deep in my gut.

“Just pretend for a little while,” she said.

I thought of the court, of the judge, of the way my name had been smeared in ways I could never erase. I thought of what it felt like to be locked away, called a criminal, a monster, a thing to be feared.

“You have no idea what it’s like,” I told her. “To stand in that courtroom. To be seen as violent. To know they think you might hunt her down, that you might hurt her.”

She hesitated, shifting from foot to foot. “I told them that’s not you,” she said quietly. “I told them I know you’re not like that.”

I was still saying this in a way that was not emphatic. The toxic shame that I had felt since the assault by Ana and her false claims was flooding my body.

I couldn’t even be emphatic or emotional for fear of appearing to be capable of violence or of harming another person.

The system had already decided what I was.

I explained how I was trying to build my life back and how this doesn't look good. 

In the end, the only evidence for the restraining order was her claim that I had told her she couldn’t have her family visit. A misunderstanding. A miscommunication twisted by the politics of the time, by the Muslim ban that had nothing to do with me.

I reminded her—I had protested that ban. I had marched against it. I had stood against the very thing that kept her family from her.

We were discussing this at her place. I had wanted so much to understand her, and I trusted that she would not make things worse. She had invited me to visit her in Durham.

And so here I was.

Of course, she invited me to visit. She had no reason to fear me.

I had to apologize for what I had said to my family about her behind her back. I said that I never do things like that.

I was shocked by the fact that I had shared it with my family. I had never spoken ill of my friends or my partner with my family.

Even with the restraining order hanging over my head, she still wanted me there.

I didn’t know what to make of it. Maybe she didn’t either.

Maybe that was the cruelest part of all.