Chapter 2: I Wasn’t His Only Victim
Roland continued working steadily, as though I were nothing more than an unconscious object lying there. He opened his laptop beside the bed, transferred the photographs he’d just taken, and appeared uploading them somewhere, repeatedly checking the notebook in his hands the entire time.
His phone buzzed several more times, each new message seemingly containing fresh instructions. At one point he took additional photographs and immediately sent them off, confirming my absolute worst suspicion — that someone else was genuinely watching and directing at least part of what he was actually doing.
Then Roland removed a small swab from his black bag and collected samples from several places across my skin. He carefully sealed each one inside a plastic bag, with that same clinical precision he applied to absolutely everything else. Finally, he packed away the camera, the notebook, the laptop. Before leaving, he leaned over and kissed my forehead, with that exact same tenderness he normally showed me. “Sweet dreams, Paloma.”
Hearing that gentle voice, right after everything I’d just witnessed, felt almost genuinely unbearable. A few minutes later, the front door quietly closed, and I heard Roland’s car pull out of the driveway, shortly before three that morning. Only then did I finally allow myself to start shaking.
My husband hadn’t merely been secretly sedating me this whole time. He’d photographed me, repositioned me, collected samples from me, documented absolutely everything, and communicated with other people while actively doing it.
Roland had told me he was leaving for a three-day business trip out to Ashmere, so I knew I genuinely had a limited window discovering exactly what was actually happening. I waited another ten minutes before getting out of bed and searching for the personal laptop he kept entirely separate from the computer he used for work.
I eventually found a locked briefcase hidden beneath our bed. The combination was our own anniversary date, and when the lock finally clicked open, I felt a sickening mixture of relief and genuine dread settle through me at once.
The laptop contained hundreds of photographs, carefully arranged into folders by date. Some went back eight full months, long before I’d noticed anything unusual myself. But what terrified me most was discovering additional folders, each one labeled with other women’s names entirely. Renata. Colette. Fiona. There were at least six different women total.
I opened Renata’s folder first and found photographs closely resembling the ones Roland had taken of me. Later images, however, showed her looking increasingly weak and genuinely unwell, and Colette’s and Fiona’s folders revealed that exact same disturbing progression over time.
Then I discovered a document simply labeled “Client Communications.” It revealed that Roland had been running a criminal operation, in which paying customers requested photographs and specific staged scenarios, involving women whose overall conditions gradually deteriorated over time. Different services carried different prices attached, and messages showed customers giving detailed instructions about exactly what they wanted Roland documenting.
I kept searching until I found an email, sent only two days earlier, mentioning me directly by name. A customer had asked about something referred to only as “Graduation Services,” and Roland’s own response made my hands begin trembling badly. He’d written that I was “almost ready,” and that he’d “begin the final phase soon.”
I genuinely didn’t know exactly what those particular words meant. But after seeing the later photographs of the other women, I knew clearly I couldn’t afford waiting around to actually discover the answer myself. I copied everything I possibly could onto a flash drive, then searched the bedroom until I found Roland’s notebook, hidden inside his own sock drawer.
The entries documented substances used, precise amounts, my own reactions, and various customer requests. More recent notes mentioned people asking specifically about “permanent access,” while Roland had written that I was becoming genuinely suspicious, and he might need “accelerating the timeline.”
That was genuinely enough. Whatever Roland had planned for his own “final phase,” I believed my safety sat in immediate, real danger. I photographed every single page, returned everything exactly where I’d found it, and tried thinking clearly through the panic. Roland genuinely couldn’t know I’d discovered his secret. Not yet, anyway. But he would eventually come home regardless. And I had exactly three days making sure I genuinely wasn’t there waiting helplessly, when he finally did.
