My husband left me in the car at 6:47 in the morning while I was having contractions six minutes apart. He grabbed his fishing gear from the back seat and told me the hospital was only twelve minutes away—I could handle it. Then he got into his father’s Chevy Silverado, and I watched the red taillights disappear down Mulberry Street while another contraction ripped through my body.

That was the morning I finally understood who I had married.
My name is Destiny Dickerson. I was twenty-nine years old, nine months pregnant, and about to give birth to my first child completely alone. I need to back up a little, because you need to understand how I ended up in that Ford Explorer, gripping the dashboard, watching my husband choose a fishing trip over the birth of his daughter.

I met Brent Holloway four years ago at a friend’s backyard barbecue in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. He was charming, attentive, and had this way of making me feel like the only person in the room. We got married after a year of dating. I kept my last name because my father had passed away two years before the wedding, and I wanted to carry a piece of him with me. Brent said he understood. Looking back, I think that was the first red flag I ignored—he understood a lot of things he never actually accepted.

Brent worked as operations manager at his father’s plumbing supply company, Holloway Pipe and Fixture. Fancy title for a job that basically meant doing whatever his daddy told him to do. His father, Gerald Holloway, was sixty-one, a widower who’d lost his wife to cancer when Brent was fifteen. I felt sorry for Gerald at first—losing your wife, raising a teenage son alone, that’s hard. But somewhere along the way, Gerald’s grief had turned into something else entirely. Control. He kept Brent on an emotional leash so tight the poor man couldn’t breathe without checking if his father approved.