Then No One Can Have Her Read Free

Prescott. Pia’s billed its services as “empowering” women in recovery, treating them also for depression, PTSD, sexual trauma, codependence, and love/sex addiction. The goal was to help them get in touch with the issues that had caused them to turn to drugs and booze.
    Although Carol had no personal problems with drugs or alcohol, she did have extensive counseling and life experience with love and sex addiction from which to draw. She’d met Steve, her charming, intelligent and athletic husband-to-be, in her late twenties after a short-lived, failed first marriage. Deeming each other a soul mate, they were married in 1982. But after a promising start, their marriage devolved into a bumpy roller-coaster ride of Steve’s multiplying affairs. In 2003, the couple separated and, reaching her limit, Carol finally filed for divorce in March 2007.
    As the oldest of nine children, Steve was also a mentor and role model, especially among his siblings. In his educated and accomplished family, Steve stood out for his ability and willingness to perform death-defying rescues—scaling a steep cliff to save one injured woman and flipping his own kayak to pull another woman out of churning white-water rapids.
    In 1995, he switched careers from academics to investment brokering, saying he wanted to continue to help people, just in a different way. The more money he made, however, the more friends he lost as he became more materialistic and manipulative, his personality, tastes and spending habits changing as his annual income shot up to $500,000.
    After Carol and Steve separated, the couple fought over who could and should spend what, how to divide their assets and sizable credit card debt. Nonetheless, Steve continued to spend and take out loans, even borrowing tens of thousands of dollars from his elderly parents to pay bills. As the battle grew more contentious and stressful for Carol, some of her friends worried she might take her own life.
    But now that the divorce papers had been signed and she had a new boyfriend—whom she was flying to Maine to visit in just a few days—Carol was doing much better. Finally feeling free of Steve’s hold over her, she was optimistic, as if she could really move on with her life.
    That relief was bolstered by the fact that she’d been tested recently and had managed to hang tough. Carol said as much in a call after work that Wednesday to her longtime friend Katherine Dean Warnett, who, coincidentally, was about to go through her own divorce the next morning.
    Carol said she’d declined Steve’s offer to drive together to see Katie off at the airport in Phoenix on Saturday, so they went separately, which made her feel even stronger. During a family dinner Steve and Carol took snapshots of each other with the girls. Then, as they were waving good-bye to Katie at the terminal, Steve put his hand on Carol’s shoulder.
    â€œFor the first time in a really long time, I didn’t get totally creeped out,” Carol told Katherine on the phone as she was driving home Wednesday evening. “It was okay. It was just okay.”
    And then in the next sentence, Carol said, “Of course he had to ruin it. He asked if I wanted to meet him for coffee. We just got divorced. Why is he asking to have coffee?” But it wasn’t just that, she said. “He had the audacity to come over.”
    Carol said Steve came to the house to plead with her to get back together. Katherine could visualize Carol shaking her head as she said, “That he would have the audacity to even propose that we should start dating again and then get married—”
    â€œWhaaat?” Katherine asked, dumbfounded.
    â€œYes, yes,” Carol said insistently. “And for him to think that I would actually do that.”
    In the past Carol had received some rather erratic push-pull e-mails from Steve, first accusing her of being a terrible mother and then expressing his