Excerpt from Chapter 1
“Courage is being scared to death… and saddling up anyway.” John Wayne
January 2006:
“My husband did not know I was planning to leave and not return. Two weeks before, he had taken my passport away and told me I was no longer allowed to leave the country. I had always traveled home to Hawaii before. This was new! He started vacillating. One day saying I could not travel again, another day, saying I could travel once a year, another day, saying that if I decided to travel back home again, I could not take our son with me; the next, saying I could not travel again. I did not know what was going on in his mind and feared I needed to get out before his thought process solidified, and he signed documents preventing me from leaving the country with our son. As an Egyptian father, he had the right to prevent his Egyptian-born son from leaving the country. It was as easy as going to one of the Egyptian ministries and signing some papers. As far as I knew, he hadn’t done this yet, but I felt this was something he might seriously be thinking about doing soon. For myself, he had no way to prevent me as an American from leaving the country. However, if he stopped me from taking our son, it would have the same effect as I would never abandon him.
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“His violent outbursts had become more and more frequent over the past few months as well. I was no longer able to predict them. His previous attempts to frighten me into submission by vehicular chicken, pushing me, throwing things at me, hitting me, choking me, locking me out of the house, and taking my son away from me started to become the status quo rather than some freak incident that he would try to explain away while promising it would never happen again. My son had been struck in the face by a blow meant for me, and the baby I carried in my body had suffered a kick to my stomach. Nobody was significantly injured, but how many times could we chance fate?! The newest development scared me the most. Ibrahim told me point blank with stone-cold composure, “ I am going to kill you.”
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