Chapter 4 - Barnaby
I need to explain who Barnaby is.
I married Barnaby Corley in 2008, when I was twenty years old. Sorrel was born in March of 2010. Tibby came along in May of 2016.
I left him in January of 2019.
I'm not going to walk through all eleven years of that marriage in detail. It wasn't the kind of bad you could point to clearly for the first six years. It became the unmistakable kind sometime around 2016, and I left three years after that — which is the honest, unflattering answer, and one I've spent plenty of time paying for in a therapist's office since.
I went to the police in June of 2019.
And in August of 2019, my brother Ives had his work van set on fire in his own driveway at two o'clock in the morning.
Barnaby was arrested, charged, and convicted in March of 2020. Eighteen months. He served nine of them and was released that December.
Sorrel was nine years old when her uncle's van burned. She was ten when her father went to prison, and eleven by the time he came back out.
There was a restraining order in place. Five years, starting in June of 2019.
It expired on the eleventh of June, 2024.
May you like
Grady Finch came to dinner on the ninth of August, 2024.
Eight weeks later.
