It took courage to walk into the county jail that day to face the man who’d raped me. I did not know what to expect; my worst fear was that he would refuse to see me, once again giving him the power. The main reason I was going was to regain my power. Sure, he was a tough guy when he had a knife and the element of surprise. He didn’t today—unless he wouldn’t see me.
I sat there on one side of the grimy glass, waiting for him to come in. The phone was next to me. The kind you see in movies, but this wasn’t a movie. It was my life. Would he know who his visitor was? And then, there he was. He walked in, saw me, and then stopped, off balance, he stumbled backward—the shock on his face was everything. For once, I had caught him off guard. Yes, he had shocked me in my home, but today, I had the element of surprise on my side. This time, I had picked the moment. I didn’t have a knife; I was not hidden behind a stocking mask. He knew who I was. The only weapons and disguise I carried were my courage and my mind. This time, he couldn’t order me to be quiet. This time, I would do the talking. I wanted him to know I was not the same woman that he’d left tied up and terrified.
I told him what he had done to my life. I told him I was afraid in my home because of him. And then I said the one thing I had come to say–that he owed me an apology.
What he said back to me astonished me. He said he couldn’t apologize because he liked to rape. It was like an addiction. He fed on the fear in the woman’s eyes. It wasn’t about sex. It was about power. Even when the woman tried to act as if she wasn’t afraid, he could always break her. That should have destroyed me, but in some terrible way, it freed me. He hadn’t spared me because I was special. He hadn’t covered me with the blanket because he cared. Our conversation did not amount to some phantom bond between us. There was only him, what he wanted, and what he had done.
As I sat across from him, I could finally see him without the mask. Without the knife, without the cowboy hat. Without the terror that made him larger than life. Now he looked smaller. Almost weak.
I felt something in me shift. I had walked into the jail a broken woman and now knew I would leave as a stronger person. He was just some guy. Some random guy who no longer had power.
Before the phone died, I did get him to apologize for frightening me. For the lost wages. For the conversations I had with my four-year-old son. I told him he could make things right by confessing. And for the first time since the night he came to my house, I felt like my voice belonged to me again.
And him? David Feury pleaded guilty.