Good is bad and bad is good.

If there is a single sentence that captures the devastation of my world, it is that one. I didn’t understand it at first. I didn’t want to. But life has a way of stripping away illusions until only the truth remains — raw, unwelcome, undeniable. That’s where my story begins: with a truth I learned the hard way, a truth that still unsettles me.

Two men shaped the course of my life.

One was a decorated military officer — a war hero, the kind of man strangers thanked for his service without knowing anything about him. He carried medals, scars, and a darkness that seeped into every corner of our home. Behind closed doors, he was violent, controlling, destructive.

The other was a member of La Eme, the Mexican Mafia — a man whose name alone could make people flinch. On paper, he was everything dangerous. In reality, he was gentle, loyal, protective in ways I had forgotten men could be.

The hero who hurt me.

The criminal who protected me.

I underestimated what domestic violence would do to my life. It destroyed it. It’s hard to rebuild after centering your entire existence around a man you were supposed to trust completely. And I still don’t know how much of what happened was his fault, and how much belonged to the institution that shaped him.

If he hadn’t been deployed…

If he hadn’t been given trial drugs…

Would he have been the same man?

I’ll never know. What I do know is this: he was taken care of. He was supported. He was protected. And somehow, that became the only thing that mattered. It didn’t matter that the whole family was affected. It didn’t matter that his wife — me — was left damaged in ways that may never heal.

There are two parts to my story.

Part one is the domestic violence — the destruction that began inside my own home, at the hands of the man I was supposed to trust.

Part two is what happened overseas — when I began to feel that our family was not safe, that we were being watched or targeted in ways I still struggle to explain.

I know I’m going out on a limb by saying this, but I genuinely believe we were targeted during those years abroad. And looking back now, I don’t think my ex‑husband was in any condition to recognise danger, even if it had been right in front of him.

He had been given experimental drugs during his military career, and I don’t believe he ever fully recovered. Even with his training, he didn’t have the clarity or stability to identify a threat. The responsibility fell to me — the one without military training — to make sense of the patterns after the fact.

So why didn’t he report anything unusual?

Because he couldn’t. He wasn’t well enough. He wasn’t fit for duty by the end, and he certainly wasn’t fit for the kind of vigilance required to keep a family safe in unfamiliar countries.

In the end, I was the one left to connect the dots he never saw. I was the one who had to understand what happened, long after the danger had already passed.

If, for argument’s sake, we were vulnerable because we were an ex‑military family travelling overseas, then who would have been watching us in places like Panama, Mexico, or even Canada? I only mention these countries because this is where the most problems occurred.

I don’t know who was targeting us. What I do know is that we were isolated, unprotected, and living in environments we didn’t fully understand. And when things began to go wrong, no one stepped in, no one to interpret the danger, no one to help us recover. No threat was ever recognised. No one even tried to understand what we had been through. Somehow drugs entered the narrative, and the moment drugs are mentioned, everything else gets dismissed.

Some days the repercussions hit so hard it feels like nothing matters anymore. Nothing in my life has been simple since.

I didn’t set out to write a novel. I set out to write — to make sense of the chaos, to understand the pieces that never fit together, to find language for what happened to me.

For years, I tried to figure it out. I never imagined I would become trapped in a nightmare on the Pacific coast of Mexico, isolated with my four children, surrounded by people who couldn’t see what was happening to us. The fear, the sabotage, the isolation — it seeped into every corner of my life. I kept searching for a name, something I could point to and say, This. This is what destroyed me.

I never imagined my ex‑husband would walk away from his family, dismiss everything we were living through, and cling only to the version of reality that suited him. I don’t believe he will ever fully accept what happened — not because it wasn’t real, but because acknowledging it would require confronting his own behaviour, something he was never willing or able to do.

The signs were there — like the brand‑new MacBook Pros in Panama suddenly becoming corrupted, or the strange interference with our internet in Panama, Mexico, and Canada. At first they were small, easy to brush aside, but they grew more obvious until ignoring them was no longer possible. Even then, understanding the complexity of what we were caught in took time — and time was the only resource I had. While I worked to piece together the truth alone, he simply moved on, untouched by the wreckage left behind.

The drinking, the drugs, the volatility he projected onto me — all of it shaped the way he saw the world. He lived inside a version of events he constructed for himself, and once he committed to that narrative, there was no room for anything else.

So what destroyed me?

What changed everything?

What left marks on my children that will never fully fade?

Domestic violence.

Coercive control.

Cyber interference.

Entrapment.

Psychological pressure.

Terrorism.

Sabotage.

None of these words fit neatly, yet all of them touch the edges of my truth.

What I do know is this: something happened in Mexico that shattered my life in ways I still struggle to comprehend. Something invisible, calculated, and terrifyingly effective. Something that left me in ruins.

When I was pulled back to Australia for eight months, every door slammed shut. I learned quickly that when it comes to domestic violence — or anything out of the ordinary — the victim loses and the perpetrator wins. I told part of my story to people who nodded politely and did nothing. I learned that justice systems can be blind, deaf, and indifferent. I learned that survival sometimes means accepting that no one is coming to save you.

I was a tourist — a mother of four seeking better opportunities for my children. I was a wife caring for a mentally ill husband. Mexico was supposed to be a pause, a chance for the children to experience culture, language, and life in a country completely different from our own. It was meant to be a reset — a place where they could run barefoot on on the beach, attend a local school, learn Spanish, and where I could finally breathe after years of overwhelming stress.

Instead, it became a cage I couldn’t escape.

The town looked harmless — a small seaside community where everyone knows everyone and nothing stays secret for long. But my nightmare stayed invisible. No one saw it. No one understood it. And those who might have understood were not allowed to say anything.

I was alone.

Intentionally isolated.

Surrounded by people who smiled at me while something darker moved beneath the surface.

My four children were with me, but they were too young to understand. They saw the fear in my eyes, the exhaustion in my body, the way I flinched at shadows. They felt the tension, the instability, the constant sense that something was wrong. They suffered in ways I still carry like stones in my chest.

And through it all, I kept asking myself the same question:

Who is doing this to me — and why?

I still don’t have the answer.

The aftermath left scars I carry every day — depression, anxiety, exhaustion, PTSD. Exhaustion so deep it felt like drowning. I have lost faith in institutions. I have lost faith in the idea that truth alone is enough. I lost faith in the belief that someone, somewhere, would care enough to help.

So I write.

Not for sympathy.

Not for revenge.

But because silence nearly killed me, and I refuse to disappear quietly.

This is my last attempt to be heard.

Maybe it becomes a life of reflection — full of theories, possibilities, and unanswered questions — suggesting that the truth is out there somewhere, between good and evil. A story where survival blurs the lines until they disappear.

It is the story of one mother who lived through the unexplainable — and lived to tell it.