Chapter 7 - The Counseling Session
The fertility clinic could not simply hand me Luke’s private counseling notes.
His medical privacy still existed, even after what he had done.
That frustrated me.
It also reminded me why systems mattered.
My attorney obtained information through proper legal processes as the criminal and family cases developed. Separately, I had access to documents from our joint insurance records showing the date, provider, and billing code.
Luke attended genetic counseling on October 14, four years earlier.
That same evening, he took me to dinner.
I remembered the restaurant because he ordered champagne and told me we should “stop obsessing over tests.”
Three weeks later, I became pregnant again.
He knew.
The second layer of the pattern emerged through our old messages.
Before each pregnancy, Luke became intensely involved with fertility tracking.
After a positive test, his attention shifted toward control.
What I ate.
How much I slept.
Whether I exercised.
Who I saw.
When something frightened me medically, he called it anxiety.
When he frightened me physically, he called it stress I had created.
And whenever doctors found uncertainty, Luke converted uncertainty into guilt.
Dana helped me build a chronology, not because a divorce judge needed a dramatic narrative, but because my own memory had been broken into isolated incidents for too long.
Seeing dates side by side changed me.
October 14: Luke attends genetic counseling.
November 6: positive pregnancy test.
December 1: first argument where he calls my body defective.
January 9: emergency visit after he grabs me on porch.
January 21: pregnancy loss.
Again, no doctor claimed the assault definitively caused the loss.
That was not the point.
The point was that Luke knew there were medical factors involving him and continued using my grief as a weapon.
Detective Alvarez later told me investigators were also reviewing my claim that Luke interfered with medical appointments.
“That doesn’t automatically become a separate crime,” she warned. “We document what we can prove.”
Again, restraint.
Again, reality.
Then one piece of behavior challenged even the explanation I had built.
Luke’s employer contacted him regarding a background issue tied to the arrest.
He responded by telling human resources that I was pursuing a “false domestic-violence narrative caused by prenatal psychiatric instability.”
He attached a medical summary.
My medical summary.
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I had never authorized him to send it.
And parts of it were wrong.
