The kitchen smelled like garlic and tomatoes. She was making pasta, her back turned, the blender drowning out every other sound. Her phone sat on the kitchen island. It was the first time in weeks it hadn’t been glued to her hand or hidden under her pillow.
. I picked it up, unlocked it, and started scrolling. She turned around less than half a minute later, her eyes landing on me with the phone in my hand. She looked startled, but tried to play it cool.
She asked what I was doing. I told her I was looking through her phone. . She twitched.
She asked what I was looking for, but I didn’t answer. After about a minute, she lunged for it. I pulled it out of reach. I asked what that was about.
. She didn’t say anything. I opened WhatsApp. There was a chat with a guy named David, someone I’d never heard of, and one of the most recent conversations on her phone.
Just from the way they talked to each other, I knew immediately. It was too lovey-dovey, too familiar. This was the man she was cheating on me with. .
Before I could even turn around to confront her, I saw the bottle swing toward my head. The red wine she was cooking with. I tried to dodge, but there wasn’t enough time. It cracked me right in the temple.
It was the hardest I’d been hit in my adult life. I hit the floor, still conscious, but seeing stars. I dropped her phone somewhere in the chaos. When I got up, she was gone.
And so was her phone. She hadn’t even checked if I was okay. She just ran. .
For a moment, I wondered if it had actually happened. She wasn’t an erratic person. She made her whole personality about how much she feared being cheated on again. She built our entire relationship on trust, mostly because of her past.
I had nothing to hide, so I went along with it. We never hid our phones from each other. She checked mine whenever she wanted. But recently, she had started hiding hers.
She kept it in her hand or under her pillow. The moment I walked into a room, she’d pocket it. When I asked to borrow her phone because mine was charging, she handed it over, but then made an excuse to take it back within a minute. I suspected something was wrong, but I hoped I was wrong.
I tried to give her the benefit of the doubt, tried to convince myself she was planning a surprise for me. But there was no occasion coming up. And now I had my answer. She became the person she hated, and instead of facing that, she tried to hit me out of existence.
I don’t know if she wanted to kill me or just knock me out. Either way, she didn’t break my skull. She gave me a very bad contusion. And, apparently, glass bottles are a lot stronger than the movies make them look.
They don’t shatter on impact. They just hurt. . As soon as I could gather myself, I called the police.
They arrived in less than ten minutes with paramedics. They checked me, and I chose to go to the hospital. I didn’t want a serious head injury going untreated. I gave my statement to the police.
I told them I didn’t know where she had gone, but I gave them names of people she might stay with. They said they’d do what they could. . She was arrested three days later.
She was charged with assault with a weapon and domestic violence. Her family paid her bail quickly, which annoyed me. I wanted her to sit in a cell for a while. But that was hoping for too much.
There was a no-contact order instituted immediately. She violated it the very first day I went back to work. She ambushed me after my shift. She said she wanted to talk.
I kept telling her she wasn’t meant to be there. She got it out eventually. She wanted me to drop the charges. She begged me not to ruin her life.
. I told her I had nothing to do with her life being ruined. She did that herself by cheating on me and then following that up with a wine bottle to my head. She said she acted irrationally because she knew she had messed up and didn’t know what to do in that moment.
It was impulsive, and the moment she did it, she knew she messed up. I pointed out that she hadn’t even bothered to know if I was okay. She didn’t call an ambulance. She just ran away.
She said we could talk it out, figure things out by ourselves. She claimed she’d pay me off instead of letting her go to jail. I told her it was out of my hands. She had a domestic, and the DA was the prosecutor, not me.
Even if I begged them to let her go, I wouldn’t have had any sway. She was going to have to deal with the consequences of what she did. Right before I left, I took a video of her standing there in front of my workplace. She freaked out, demanded I delete it.
I told her I wasn’t going to. She tried to swipe my phone from me. I reminded her that if she touched me, especially with a no-contact order in place, she’d make her life so much worse. She backed off.
Her parents contacted me the same day. They were begging on her behalf. It was almost funny, because they hadn’t reached out to me once during the entire ordeal. Not even to check if I was okay.
Apparently she had told them about her stupid move, and they were panicking. They were scared I’d report that she had breached the order and make things worse. I milked it. I actually didn’t care enough to report her, but I made a big show of it.
I told them I was going to, and they weren’t going to change my mind. Her dad called me childish. He said she was already in trouble and there was no need to put her in more. I told him she was childish when she whacked me on the head with a wine bottle.
And that was excluding the fact that she only did that because I found out she was cheating on me. Something she probably hadn’t told them. I was right. She hadn’t told them.
He went silent for a few seconds, then said weakly, “Everyone makes mistakes. ” I hung up. I was furious. I made a note to send the video of her contacting me to the prosecutor.
I wanted to make things worse for her. I did that the next day. Her bond was revoked. It was audacious to meet up with the person you assaulted on their first day back at work.
The video didn’t put her in a flattering light. The moment she noticed the phone, she got riled up, which made her look aggressive. There was a warrant put out for her arrest immediately. She was put behind bars.
At her revocation hearing, they decided she wasn’t enough of a risk to lock up until trial, so they just increased her bond. When her folks paid that, too, she got an ankle monitor to make sure she didn’t come near me. She didn’t. And hasn’t.
The trial came. She was charged with assault with a weapon and domestic violence as the major charges, plus a bunch of minor ones that added nothing. Her lawyer got a lot of the smaller charges dismissed, but the prosecutor did a good job on the bigger ones. There was very little space for her to deny those.
She tried, since I didn’t exactly have evidence it was her. But her inconsistent stories and cameras showing her fleeing our apartment building around the time corroborated my story. The two things the judge really didn’t like were the fact that she didn’t bother to check if I was okay before fleeing. He said I could have had a brain bleed and she would have left me there to die.
He also pointed out her violating the no-contact order as a dangerous and unpredictable move. Even with all of that, she only got six months in jail, mostly because she was a first-time offender. She’d have a long probation period after release, and she was mandated to attend counseling sessions for anger and emotional regulation. It annoyed me, because there was no way to prove what her intention was when she hit me.
If she had hit me at least once more, attempted murder would have been easier to argue. But just one swing, and then she ran. I was happy she was going to jail, though. Very happy.
Her parents spoke to me outside the courthouse after the conviction. Just like her, they found a way to claim I was ruining their daughter’s life. Like it was all my fault. Like I had woken up one day and decided to send her to jail.
I told them everything she was going through was a consequence of her actions. If she had behaved herself, none of it would have happened. I pointed out their daughter was going to be a felon, and it had nothing to do with me. Her life was going to be so different purely because she didn’t have self-control.
Her dad looked furious. I could see his fists balled up, like he wanted to hit me. I wanted to push his buttons enough so he could end up behind bars too. But I’d taken more than enough hits recently.
I didn’t need to add another one to the mix. I don’t know how Daniella is doing in jail. I don’t really care to find out. I hope she isn’t having a great time.
I hope she’s regretting every single move that brought her to this point. She could have just been faithful, and life would have been so much easier. But for some reason, I wasn’t enough for her. And now she has to deal with the consequences.
It has nothing to do with me. Not only is she a felon now, but she’ll have her name immortalized as a criminal. It’s the kind of legacy she deserves to have following her around, as far as I’m concerned. I’m completely okay now.
The doctors assumed it was a really hard hit from the size of the contusion, so I’m just glad to be perfectly fine. There’s no moral to this story. I didn’t do anything wrong, and there was no way for me to predict that my girlfriend would batter me over the head with a bottle. All I can really say is to turn your discernment up to the max when dealing with a new person.
Try to sniff out that crazy in them because I didn’t, and I ended up in the hospital as a result. The cheating alone would have been enough to walk away. Everything after that, the arrest, the charges, the jail time, wasn’t me ruining her life. It was the natural consequences of her repeatedly making the worst possible decision at every fork in the road.
Her family stepping in with the “everyone makes mistakes” routine is almost impressive in its denial. She never once prioritized whether I was okay. Not immediately after, not later, not even when begging me to fix things for her. Her concern was always herself.
Her record. Her freedom. Her comfort. That tells you everything you need to know about who she really is.
.
