By Gwyn Devereaux
I thought he was the one. To him, I was just the next one.
That is the betrayal at the heart of the Madness behind the Mask. The person I trusted most—the man who once slept beside me—became the person I feared. What I believed was my future became a struggle to understand the lies, confront the stalking, and get him out of my home.
I wrote this book because those two versions of a relationship can be difficult to explain: the life you thought you were living and the reality you eventually had to face.
What happens behind closed doors
From the outside, a relationship can look very different from what someone is experiencing inside it. A familiar face, a shared home, and years of trust do not tell the whole story.
My memoir follows my own experience of betrayal, manipulation, theft, stalking, and fear. It is a personal account of discovering how little I knew the person beside me, and of trying to reclaim my life while dealing with the consequences of that discovery.
Writing about it means returning to difficult ground. But keeping the story only to myself would leave out something that matters to me: the possibility that another reader might recognize a pattern they have struggled to put into words.
The faith that carried me through
Fear is part of this story. So is my renewed faith.
I do not want the terror to be the only thing readers take away from these pages. My faith belongs in the telling because it was part of how I survived. It gave me something to hold on to when the life I had imagined was no longer the life in front of me.
That does not erase what happened. It is part of the truth of how I lived through it.
A story with resources for the reader
Alongside my account, the book includes behavior checklists and information about support organizations, shelters, phone numbers, and websites. I wanted readers who recognized troubling experiences in their own lives to have places to turn beyond the final page.
Mask is where my story begins. Getting him to leave my home did not end it. The next chapter continues in the Madness behind the Gavel: Justice, which follows the eight-year court battle that came afterward.
If you want to understand the beginning of the Madness series, start here—with the trust, the betrayal, the fear, and the faith that carried me through.