Before You Knew My Name

by Jacqueline Bublitz

There will never be enough days to scrub clean the lies Tom Martin has poured all over this woman’s body. Each revelation that will come—the hardcore, underage pornography on his computer, the fake profiles he’s posted on dating sites, the bags of amphetamines hidden in his closet, an ex-girlfriend who said he had stalked her when she left him. And soon enough, the details of how he smashed an eighteen-year-old girl’s head with the lens of her camera, squeezed her throat with his nicotine-stained fingers, and continued his assault on her body as she lay dying on the banks of the Hudson River. How he scooped up her underwear and shoes and jacket and unscrewed the bloody lens from the camera, all the while standing over the battered body of a teenage girl. Though no one else will understand the specificity of her horror, this is the part that will come to haunt his wife the most. The calmness with which her husband must have packed up the evidence of a young life. The calculation of what to keep and what to leave behind. Nothing will ever again be true for this woman. It is never just one life these men destroy.