He beamed, pausing for effect, his ego swelling from their admiration. Like a snake charmer he wooed them, just as he’d wooed me years before.

After a few moments, the crowd calmed.

“It gives me great pleasure to introduce you to the love of my life. My wife. My partner. Sylvia Bekkar.”

I dutifully walked onto the stage and gripped his hand. Strobes flashed. He raised our clasped fingers high in the air. My heart soared at his touch. Gentle and loving. Together we left the stage and greeted constituents at the rope line. Afterward, as I tumbled over the edge of false impressions into a cold reality, staffers swept me out of the way.

“You ooze charisma,” the campaign manager told Izaan, patting him on the back.

I watched as Izaan pushed past him and headed for the campaign bus. And so it went, stop after stop, month after month. Izaan’s poll numbers rose. My spirits fell. Slowly, Izaan’s mask of confident composure shattered under the pressure. Nervous glances over his shoulder escalated once we were issued Secret Service.

“Get them away from me,” he ordered, pointing at the agents posted outside the campaign bus. “I don’t need government spies watching my every move.”

“They’re here for your protection,” an advisor said.

Izaan leveled him with a glare. “I know their claims. I also know the truth.”

The campaign manager pulled Izaan inside the bus. “Are you all right?”

Izaan held up a document. “You hand me sacrilege like this and call it a speech?” He tore it in two. “Then you ask if I’m all right? Leave, before I fire you.”

Drunk on the prospect of riding their horse into the White House, the staff attributed Izaan’s outbursts to exhaustion.

“I don’t care what the hell you need to do, just get him through the election,” I overheard the campaign manager say to a deputy. “We’ll deal with him after November.”

Fools.

A day later, we were back home for a night. I entered Izaan’s bedroom to check on him, determined to show him that I cared, that I wanted to be a part of his life. Our life.

He emerged from his bathroom wearing only a towel. “What are you doing in here? Snooping around?”

“I—”

He grabbed a handful of my red hair. “Filthy American whore. Tempting me. Is this what you want?” He dropped his towel, revealing his naked muscular frame. “Is it?”

I said nothing.

He yanked my head back, his face inches from mine. “You want to know my secrets.”

I fought against crying. “You’re hurting me.”

“What are you?” he asked in a voice as soft as a caress.

“Please. I love—”

He jerked my hair again.

I grabbed his arm. “I’m a—”

“Say it.”

“Filthy whore.” I spit the words at him. “I’m a filthy whore.”

“This is what happens to whores.”

He shoved me facedown on the bed. I scrambled for safety. He caught my foot, knocked me to the floor, then wrenched my nightgown up over my head, tangling my face and arms in the silk, pinning me down.

A knock on the door. “You all right, sir?”

Secret Service.

Izaan slammed his palm over my mouth.

I writhed for air.

“Leave me be,” Izaan yelled.

Footsteps retreated.

He held me down, thrusting his hatred into me. For days afterward, my body ached and his words replayed in my mind like a stale song. I’d seen his anger before. Felt its wrath. But this was different, raw and exposed.

Drip…drip…drip.

I plotted to leave him. Later. After the campaign. He was under so much pressure. He didn’t mean it. He loved me. Needed me. I couldn’t leave. A continuous loop of rationalization circled around my mind coming back to the same awful conclusion. He was the force that held my world together, and without him, I’d spin out of control.

“‘You may hate a thing although it is good for you, and love a thing although it is bad for you,’” Izaan would say.

I didn’t know from where the quote originated, but it nagged at me, made me wonder.

November loomed.

Izaan won.

Nonstop news coverage of the most recent beheading in the Middle East wound my anxiety into a tangled knot. Forty-eight hours after the election, Izaan’s staff showed up at our home. Izaan jerked me to my feet, his fingers digging into my arm. He turned me to face men I’d never seen before and insisted that I look them in the eye.

“‘Men have status above women.’” Another of those quotes. “‘Good women are obedient.’”

“What are you talking about?”

With forefinger and thumb, he wrenched my chin around to face his all-male staff. I dropped my gaze. He smiled. Then he ordered them to scour our home, to cleanse it of the world of the infidel. Nothing unclean would follow us to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Infidel? I’d never heard him utter this word before.

He smacked the side of my head. I reeled. Humiliation stained my cheeks. His men ripped the designer wardrobe from my closet. I suddenly realized that they were the costumes of a disposable prop: me. I fought Izaan as he dragged me to the cellar.

“You’ve learned so little.”

He shoved me next to the old incinerator. Radiating heat singed the hair on my arm and snapped at my skin. They fed my wardrobe into the flames, reducing the clothing he’d taught me to wear to ashes. They incinerated the lifestyle he’d insisted I master in order to project the flawless image of a model American couple: the next president and first lady of the United States of America.

Photographs of our smiling faces at our wedding, political events and holidays were burned, along with books, bibles, magazines and artwork. Only pictures of Izaan—without my presence, or that of any other woman—were kept. Beyond tears, I stood speechless. I’d kept his secret. Helped him build a secular image that America would swallow.

“Do you see how it is now?” he asked. “Do you see what we worked so hard to achieve? Now this country will be led to Allah.”

Then I knew.

The Quran.

His quotes were paraphrased from the Quran.

I met his gaze.

He would pay.

Only one bag accompanied me to Washington and the Hay Adams Hotel. Demoralized, I donned Izaan’s latest demand—a burqa. The top of the burqa was shaped like a pillbox hat. From there, black fabric fell in a deliberately formless shape to the floor. The only other detail was the mesh veil that hid my face and eyes. Tears slashed mascara across my cheeks.

The burqa gripped me in a bone-crushing depression. It devoured my peripheral vision and my self-respect. The veil distorted my perception. Through it, even the brightly upholstered chairs and ornately carved bed of the hotel appeared worn and worthless.

Reality, terrifying and ugly as a cobra about to strike, snapped into focus. Thoughts flew at me from a thousand broken places. I wanted to scream. If I started, I wouldn’t stop. I needed to think.

To act.

A high-pitched ringing grew in my ears, and buzzed through my brain like a menacing swarm of bees. I walked into my bathroom and retrieved the prescription Izaan demanded I take.

I stared at the bottle.

Until now, he controlled me, inside and out. His precious pills were supposed to help with the ringing, my depression and everything else. They didn’t. When I took them, I felt submerged beneath the world, slogging upstream against a relentless current. Detached and passive.

I studied the label. What was really in the bottle?

I unscrewed the top and dumped the entire contents into the toilet.

Izaan would be furious.

I was delighted.

Water swirled around the bowl, sucking the venomous capsules into the vortex, siphoning them down the drain, just as I’d been sucked into the dizzying eddy of Izaan’s deception.

Secret Service Agent Frank Harrigan knocked on my door. “It’s time.”

I fought to find a smile, but instead I found hate and clung to it.