Mary Jane Markey (not her real name) was faced with betrayal, abuse and manipulation from her obsessive, controlling ex-husband, which was allowed to continue for years thanks to the incompetence of some of the professionals who should have been helping and the inadequacy of the British justice system. Only after a determined fight did she manage to turn herself from victim to survivor, regaining her freedom, her independence and her self respect and building a better life for herself and her child.
Excerpt
From Chapter 33 - Abandoned Pregnant and Penniless
Early pregnancy took it's toll on me the second time around. Again I went off food and hardly ate at all. The mornings were the worst and the sickness was hard to deal with. Getting up on a morning, I slowly ate some toast to try and keep the queasiness at bay. Sometimes it took four slices to ease it to a bearable degree. I tried to keep a banana in my bag just in case, especially driving to work in the morning. I often reached work and had to rush to the ladies to throw up. I couldn't bear to deal with problems early on a morning, let alone arguments, yet one morning I had to. It was the morning when my life fell to pieces.
The morning of Saturday May 9th, 2009, a week after my first wedding anniversary was a morning like the rest, feeling sick and having no energy at all. Yet it was the morning that my husband chose to cause an argument. I was sitting in the lounge struggling to eat my toast as always and he began asking me what was wrong and why I wasn't very talkative. Talk about being paranoid! he knew I felt poorly on a morning. I told him that I was just tired and not feeling too good. In the end he said that I was moody and just like his first wife. I couldn't face arguing, so I just said that I wasn't going to argue with him, I told him I was taking mu mum to get her grocery shopping as we always did, though we usually all went together. I got my son and we left the house to go and pick my mum up. As we went around the store, I kept checking my mobile phone for text messages, fully expecting my husband to text me. he didn't.
About an hour and a half later I dropped my mum off at home and headed home with my son. I'd almost reached home when I turned the corner and my house was in sight. That's when I spotted the van right outside my house with the removals name on the side of it. It was the same firm he'd used to move his furniture in the first time. It was a huge shock, but I knew exactly was happening before I'd even stopped outside my house. All I can say is that it must have been planned. Surely nobody could get a removals firm that quickly.
