real life
When Connie Pisor, 55, met her stepdaughter’s new man, his apparent devotion was masking a far darker side
Kneading the dough carefully with her tiny fingers, concentration was etched on her face as she leant over the bowl. Once the mixture had been shaped into a ball, she looked up at me and grinned in delight. Soon I was showing her how to roll out the dough and cut it into shapes. Side by side, just like any mother and daughter, the pair of us placed the cookies onto a baking tray and popped it in the oven. But Nicole wasn’t my biological daughter.
She was four when I’d married her dad, Jake, now 57, and I’d been thrust into a motherly role straight away. Nicole saw her mother, but she lived with Jake and me, and I grew to love her deeply. Jake and I had a son of our own, Jimmy, and when he began calling me “Mummy”, Nicole began to call me that too. “You’re my mum, and my mother is my mother,” is the way she explained it, making my heart swell with emotion.
Her dad and I supported her through the teenage years and provided a shoulder to cry on when she had boyfriend trouble, Jake sighing that she often made a bad choice when it came to men. In 2008, at the age of 23, she got married, but after just one year the marriage was over. By then she’d met a tattoo artist, Thomas, when she’d gone to have an inking of a cherry tree on her right hip.
At our house one day, they sat on the sofa holding hands. If she wanted anything, he leapt up to fetch it for her. He seemed to be devoted to her, and Jake remarked to me later that maybe, this time, she’d made a good choice. I approved too. Their relationship f lourished, and they had a baby girl, Abigail, in 2012. But the little girl had been born with her abdominal organs outside her body, and she needed surgery and a period in the intensive care unit. That’s when we saw a different side to Thomas.
“I’ll tell you when you can hold her,” he said, firmly in charge, dictating who could feed her and when. I put his controlling behaviour down to him simply being overprotective towards Abigail. But once she was out of hospital, his haughty attitude continued. Jake and I wanted to get a professional photo shoot with our granddaughter and as it was nearly Christmas, we wanted her to wear red. We were stunned when Thomas refused, telling us that they weren’t celebrating Christmas anymore. I knew Nicole loved Christmas, yet she agreed to go along with his stance.
His domineering temperament became even more apparent when our youngest son, Derek, graduated from the army. On the day of the ceremony, Thomas had agreed to wait at a nearby hotel with Abigail s
