Ella Kendale had married the man she thought was her soulmate at the age of twenty-five. The two moved into an apartment just a few blocks from the ocean in Surfside Beach, South Carolina, over a three-hour drive from her childhood home.
The first couple of years weren't that bad, but then her husband began to change. He had never been the romantic, affectionate type, but seemingly overnight, he began to become enraged at the drop of a hat. The slightest thing she did or didn't do set him off into a verbal and physical explosion. Not having dinner hot and on the table when he came in from work used to be no big deal. Now, it meant the difference between whether she was assaulted or not.
The first few times it happened, she blamed herself. Surely if she had said something different or acted better, he would be happy with her, like he had been in the beginning. But as time went on, she realized she wasn't the problem.
He made her quit her job as a waitress at a nearby steakhouse. He demanded she cut all ties with her friends and family. She was also forbidden from even saying hello to the neighbors in passing. Twice, those neighbors had called the police to report a domestic disturbance in the apartment next door. Yet, both times, he had talked his way out of being arrested. On three other occasions, he took her to the hospital for injuries he had caused. He told the doctors she had simply fallen down the stairs or walked into a door. Most of the time, the injuries she had suffered would not have been considered consistent with the excuse he gave, but no one ever questioned it. More than once, she thought he was going to kill her. She tried one time to get help from law enforcement, but in swooped her husband, claiming she had had a little too much to drink, and she didn't realize what she was saying. After that, Ella accepted her fate.
She recognized this was her life, and she should just learn to live with being married to a man who despised her. In her dreams, however, she was joyful. She was married with children, living in a nice house, and surrounded by family and friends who loved her unconditionally. One day, she awoke from one of those wonderful dreams and decided she was going to change her life.
That day, while her husband was at work, she packed all she could hold in two rolling suitcases and her purse. She took the bank book that her grandmother had left her when she passed a year earlier. Her grandmother had prayed she would one day have the courage to leave and find real happiness. Her husband had taken the bank book and ordered her not to lay a finger on it. Taking twenty dollars in coins from the jar on the fridge, where her husband kept his loose change, Ella cautiously snuck out of the apartment and hailed a cab. Shortly thereafter, she arrived at the bank and withdrew the forty-two thousand dollars her grandmother had left her. Next, she took a cab to the airport. Boarding the plane bound for Los Angeles after a layover in Dallas, she felt a wide range of emotions from nervousness to anticipation.
Upon landing in Los Angeles, she immediately went to the ticket counter and purchased a seat on a flight to Nashville. Even though she was paying with cash, she was terrified her husband would track her to California. She wanted to get as far away from there as possible.
When the plane landed in Nashville, she finally breathed a sigh of relief. Searching through the telephone directory in the airport, she called the first realtor she found. After asking a few questions, she was told of a simple, two-story house that was for sale on a gravel road in a rural area about a thirty-minute drive from the airport. After contemplating only a few moments, she bought the property sight unseen and made arrangements to meet the realtor there within the next hour.
A taxicab took her from the airport to the house, helped her collect her belongings from the trunk, and left her standing alone in the dark in front of the house and yard, overgrown with weeds.
Ella was happy with her decision as she looked up at the structure in front of her. The grass needed mowing, and the porch could use some tending to, but she was excited that the house would be all hers as soon as the realtor arrived to collect her money and give her the keys.
The realtor arrived half an hour late, looking aggravated, and tossed her the keys from a distance before remembering he still needed the money. Grumbling to himself, he exited the car and approached her on the porch. "This was my great-aunt's old place. She left all kinds of stuff in there when she died. You can do whatever you want to with it all. I don't care. Throw it out, keep it, doesn't matter. I'm glad to be rid of the place. That'll be thirty-nine thousand, please," the older, out-of-breath man stated matter-of-factly as he held out his hand.
Seconds later, with money in hand, he too left her standing in the dark as he pulled away. As the crickets serenaded her from the darkness around the property, Ella took a deep breath and unlocked the front door of her new home.