At Abby’s wedding in Baltimore a few weekends back, she place KP and I at a table with Kevin #1, my first boyfriend at Hood.

We exchanged numbers before we left, and I got a drink with him last night. We started talking about living in Frederick, and I told him about the assault.

When I finished, he paused for a second before saying, “Would it help you if I told you about when I was followed home by a group of strangers with a baseball bat?”

And he did, and it was a rough one.

And then he said he was sorry how he dumped me and that I deserved so much better from him, and we agreed that neither of us deserved what happened to us. It was the first time I didn’t feel so alone.