Everyone Who Tried to Save Me Turned Against Me

Everyone Who Tried to Save Me Turned Against Me

My boyfriend entered our village shrine to ask for a blessing before our wedding.

Ten minutes later, he came out, wrapped his hands around my throat, and promised my father he would kill me himself.

He wasn't the first.

Every man who offered to take me away went into that shrine and came back disgusted, violent, or both.

My father called it a curse. Then he beat me for bringing it upon myself.

When my grandmother saw my bruises, she came with my uncles to take me home.

I thought she was the one person my father could never turn against me.

Then my uncles entered the shrine.

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“You've put up with a woman like this?” Ryan asked my father. “I'd have gotten rid of her years ago.”

My boyfriend, Ryan Cole, had just come out of the village shrine. He'd gone in with my father to ask for a blessing before we married. Now he wouldn't even look at me when he spoke.

“You've been good to me, Mr. Bennett. I'll do you a favor. I'll kill her myself.”

He grabbed my throat and drove me to the floor.

I clawed at his hands. A few minutes earlier, I'd been waiting for him to come back so we could leave together. Now his thumbs pressed into my neck, and my father stood watching.

“Ryan. You'll go to prison.”

“For getting rid of you?”

He rammed his knee into my stomach. I doubled up beneath him and couldn't draw another breath. By the time he let go, I could barely move.

He kicked me twice on his way out.

“Don't ever come near me again.”

I was still trying to get up when my father, Thomas Bennett, kicked me back down.

He was the village chief. People who would stop to chat with him at our gate kept walking when they heard me scream. I stopped fighting and covered my head. He went on hitting me long after I stopped asking him to stop.

When he finished, two fingers were swollen and bent, and every breath hurt my ribs.

Ryan wasn't the first. Over the ten years since I'd turned twenty, I'd brought men home believing one of them would marry me and take me away. Each went into the shrine. Each came out wanting nothing more to do with me. Some, like Ryan, attacked me before leaving.

My father offered the same explanation every time.

“She brings bad luck. She's offended the deities.”

Then he'd beat me again, supposedly to appease them.

I didn't want to believe a building could change someone that way. But I'd watched it happen too often to dismiss it. Whatever was inside, I needed to see it.

Once I could hold my phone, I messaged a few friends who'd grown up in villages like ours. Did anything like this happen where they lived?

One wrote back: “Everyone goes into ours. Women too.”

Another said they held celebrations there. Nobody came out hating the person they'd gone in to marry.

“Claire, are you sure it's the shrine?” a friend asked. “Your dad's always been awful to you. Go inside and see what he's doing.”

I'd tried. My father said only men could enter. If I begged, he refused. If I kept asking, he hit me.

There were three daughters in our house: me and the two younger girls he'd adopted. He never treated them the way he treated me. He even held back when they were watching, as though the sight of him beating me might upset them.

For a while, I thought that explained it. Perhaps I wasn't his child.

I'd secretly arranged a DNA test. Thomas Bennett was my biological father.

Then I'd wondered whether he hated my mother and took it out on me. But Evelyn had been dead for years, and he still spoke about her as if no other woman could compare. Whenever someone suggested he remarry, he refused.

“I loved Evelyn. There won't be anyone else.”

People admired him for it. A devoted widower, raising his own daughter and taking in two more. When I told them what happened at home, they looked at me as though I were insulting a good man.

I called my mother's mother. Before I could lose my nerve, I sent her videos of the bruises and held my injured hand up to the camera.

She asked me to turn so she could see my back.

Then she began to cry.