weight in a short period of time. One of her tall blonde employees asked Aurora in her valley girl accent, “How have you lost weight so fast, Mrs. Aurora? What is your secret?” She touched Aurora’s arm. “Oh my God, you have to tell me your secret.”
Aurora just stared at her employee blankly. “Well, it is just working out and eating healthy.” Or not eating at all. “But hey, enough about me, you have a deadline, Jessica. So you should get back to work. As Aurora shut her office door, she muttered, I just can’t eat anything.
Aurora took her feet off the scale and set them on the cold, white mosaic tiles of Tessa’s bathroom floor. Tears started to roll down her face as she put her hand against the wall to maintain her balance. She felt the ribs while rubbing over her shirt and lifted it up to look at herself in the mirror. She quickly pulled her shirt down and took a deep breath.
Aurora walked out of the bathroom to find Tessa cooking something in the kitchen.
“Let me make you some soup or something, Aurora,” Tessa said.
“No,” Aurora said. “The idea of food makes me sick.”
“I hate seeing you like this.”
“It’s fine. I will be fine. You eat what you want,” Aurora said as she looked for something in the fridge.
“This protein drink is all I can eat,” she said as she grabbed it out of the fridge, showing it to Tessa. “I can only drink the butter pecan one today.”
“That is not enough, Aurora!” Tessa hesitated. “At least try to drink a couple more a day.”
“I said, it’s fine!” Aurora said. “I will be fine. I manage to work still, so I will make it through.”
“Aurora, you are not fine,” Tessa said. “You are far from fine. You have to take care of yourself.”
“It’s easier said than done,” Aurora said.
“That is true. I mean, I don’t know how you feel or how to help,” Tessa said. “But taking care of yourself is quintessential to your surviving, and if you can’t do it, then I am not going to let you wither away and die on me.”
“It is not that serious.”
“Yes, it is!” Tessa exclaimed. “You are skin and bones. I know you see it when you look in the mirror. Aurora, you've got to try to eat something. Force yourself.”
“Come on, now,” Aurora said, startled.
“I’m sorry,” Tessa said. “I am just worried about you and I wish I knew the right thing to say or do to help you. You just came back into my life. I don’t want to lose you again.”
“Tessa, you won’t lose me.”
“Aurora, I just know that if you don’t gain any weight, I am going to take you to a hospital,” Tessa said. “Have you thought about seeing a therapist?”
“I don’t think I will be able to accept help from anyone,” Aurora said. “No one can help me at this point besides myself. I want to eat: I just can’t.”
--
Aurora only was able to drink one small bottle of a nutritional beverage a day for another two weeks. Each shake equaled about three hundred calories. The muscle on her body went soft since her stomach had no fat left because her stomach was eating it. Her backbone showed through the back of her shirt when she would wear tight clothes. Tessa saw that Aurora was on the brink of dying from her starving herself, and she was already skinny.
“You look terribly ill, Aurora. I am going to take you to the hospital.”
“You can’t,” Aurora said. “I have to work tomorrow.”
“I think your boss will understand.”
“No. He won’t,” Aurora said. “He never cares about these things or cares about his employees, even though I run his magazine.”
“Okay then,” Tessa said. “If he needs you that bad, then he will not fire you for missing one or two days.”
“Fine, you can take me.” Tessa went to Aurora’s room and helped her pack an overnight bag. “I am worried I am going to die.” Aurora broke down in tears.
“You were beginning to scare me with not eating,” Tessa said. She and Aurora were on the way to the hospital. “Well, I mean not being able to eat.”
“I have just been tortured for weeks by the thought of how I put up with all of what he did. I am madder at myself than anyone else. I was such an idiot. Why did I ever marry him or put myself in this situation? Why did I say yes to him in that stupid airport?”
“Aurora, you will be fine. I promise,” Tessa said. “Besides, you have me again, and I am not going anywhere.”
“That is true,” Aurora said. “You are someone who is not feeding me, per se, but feeding my soul.”
“What is that?”
“Well, I know I have to be stronger to get back at him. Gannon keeps trying to contact me, but I ignore his calls, voicemails, texts, and Facebook messages.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this?”
“I don’t know. I just enjoy torturing him for my own benefit,” Aurora said. “I want him to know I am ignoring him because out of everything in the world, Gannon hates nothing more than being ignored or not being in control.”
“Does it actually make you feel better?” Tessa asked.
“I want to feel better about this, but I can’t. I feel nothing, Tessa.”
Chapter 6
Aurora was in the hospital for a week. She got on some new medication and saw a counselor while she was there, and they put her in contact with a domestic abuse center that helped people who went through what Aurora did. The center was Domestic Abuse Intervention Services, a non-profit organization in Madison, known as DAIS.
DAIS was important to Aurora because she started to meet with a support group from the organization, which was one of the many services they offered.
--
A few days after getting out of the hospital, while Aurora was engulfed in her work, a mutual friend of Aurora and Gannon’s reached out to Aurora. He was tall and slim with green eyes and sun-kissed skin. Melih, pronounced Mel-lee, would come over for house parties at Aurora and Gannon’s townhouse on occasion, but would never drink. He was from Istanbul, a highly populated city in Turkey. Though some people from Turkey did not practice Islam, Melih did. He liked the spirituality that religion made him feel and he thought alcohol would get in the way of that. Many people respected him for it. Aurora always did. She respected it more after the doctor she was seeing, after she left the hospital, told her to stop drinking with her anxiety medication.
Melih called Aurora before lunch.
“Hey, Melih.” Hmm... I wonder why he’s
