Crash Into Me_ A Survivor's Search for Justice - Liz Seccuro [30]
I saw William Beebe only once more, under circumstances so surreal it was hard for me to believe afterward what had happened. It was a spring evening in my third year, and I was hanging out with my sisters at the sorority house. We had ordered pizza to be delivered and I had collected the money. When the doorbell rang, I was the one who ran to the door.
Crash.
There, in a delivery uniform, stood Beebe. He was unmistakable. And he knew me. He recognized me. He looked as frightened as I was. Many times I had imagined confronting him, shaking him until he admitted what he had denied to the dean, forcing him to cower with shame for the irreparable harm he had done. But now I just fumbled with the wad of bills in my hands, shoving them at him without waiting to hear the total or calculate the tip. I grabbed the pizza boxes from his hands, slammed the door, and double-locked it. I stood at the window, watching him climb down the stone steps from our house and into the delivery vehicle, while I tried to breathe.
I dropped the pizza boxes and shoved them across the floor, into the chapter room. My heart was pounding as I crawled up the stairs to my room and collapsed on the bed. I had been trying to act normal, to feel normal, but seeing Beebe again tore me apart. I felt like I was experiencing the trauma all over again. The truth was, the scars would last long after college.
Two months before graduation, I fell in love with a law student named Dan. He was older, charismatic, good-looking, smart, and funny. What he failed to tell me was that he already had a girlfriend. Actually, she was his fiancée. I didn’t know about her until he dumped her to be with me.
After graduating, I accepted an entry-level position at Grey Advertising in New York and moved back into my parents’ house. But every Friday, I would board the Amtrak train in Penn Station to visit Dan in Baltimore, where he was studying for the bar exam. Our relationship flourished and soon I quit my job and moved to Baltimore to be with him. We were back in New York for my twenty-third birthday when he proposed to me under the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center with a beautiful diamond ring. We married in a gorgeous ceremony at my childhood church and honeymooned in Aruba. We bought a beautiful townhouse in the historic Bolton Hill section of Baltimore. I set up house and spent my days decorating and my evenings entertaining his colleagues. It seemed like a fairy tale, but it was quite the opposite. My smart and successful new husband turned out to be a womanizing cad with a volatile personality and anger-management problems. Many of my friends did not enjoy his company, and soon I noticed that the other law firm wives we socialized with did not like him.
Even during the times I thought I was happy, I would occasionally suffer what my husband and I called “the wave.” We would be out at a restaurant or walking on the beach, and I would feel suddenly ill. Nausea and terror would sweep over me. It usually lasted only a few minutes, but it would leave me sweating and exhausted on a bench or sidewalk, struggling to catch my breath.
When my husband’s volatile temper escalated to the point where I could no longer stay, I packed a few suitcases one night and left. Our divorce was obviously acrimonious. He came from a family of lawyers and they all helped represent him. I had no money—Dan had encouraged me to be a stay-at-home wife for the most part, and I had signed a prenuptial