Once upon a time, I vanished. One day I was myself, and the next, I became someone entirely different—both familiar and unsettlingly strange.

In 1989, not long after my second marriage, my new husband and I loaded my two daughters, then aged seven and three, into the backseat of a used car we bought with cash.

We had sold most of our possessions and abandoned the rest, keeping only what could fit: clothes and toys, bedding, four place settings, a pot, a pan, a shoebox brimming with photos, my strongbox filled with essential documents, and a sack containing all our money.

While starting fresh where no one knew us might have been thrilling, this was a makeshift witness protection plan. Tucked under the driver’s seat was a manual about forging new identities.

My ex-husband Gil – my daughters’ father – was the reason we’d run. When I left him for an old friend, Vinnie, he’d gone off the rails.

Gil’s behavior turned menacing. He was frequently intoxicated, either drunk or high. He would stalk and intimidate me, threatening to shoot me. He even said he’d decapitate me and place my head in the refrigerator for the girls to discover.

It was during this period that he told me he’d once killed a man.

He thrived on my fear. The threat of violence thrilled him. When I could no longer endure it, I made my escape to my mother’s home—a drive of eight hours to Carlsbad, California.

But I couldn’t stay gone forever. Gil and I had unfinished business. I had a job I couldn’t afford to lose, and I didn’t want Erin, my eldest, to miss her final week of first grade. I had to go home.

‘You can’t be there,’ I said to him on the phone. ‘Will you be there?’

After a long silence he said: ‘Not if you don’t want me to be.’

The key in the lock. The front door opening. I carried one child, heavy with sleep; the other child clung to me.

We stepped into the dark, a hollow silence that felt predatory. Faint smell of fire. I tensed from head to toe and waited for my eyes to adjust.

Slowly, outlines of our furniture emerged: the piano, the couch, the coffee table.

I led the girls into the bedroom and tucked them in.

In the living room I knelt by the fireplace and stuck a hand over the ashes. Bits of unburned paper were mixed in, nothing I could identify. Did they still give off heat? I thought so, but it might’ve been my imagination.

I sat back on my heels.

A car pulled into the building’s parking lot, its headlights shining in through cracks in our window blinds. An engine shut off and the headlights went out. A car door slammed.

It was three in the morning – was it Gil? Had he been watching? I couldn’t know without checking, but I was frozen in place. The building’s front door opened, and I heard footsteps in the entry, then the sound of someone climbing the stairs.

It was only a neighbor coming in late.

I scrambled to my feet and looked all around. The piano, the couch, the coffee table, everything as it should be. My eye settled on the basket we filled with the girls’ toys. Behind it, a row of framed photographs hung on the wall. Something was off there.

I moved closer. The first photo was one I’d always loved of Gil and Mom, taken at the reception on our wedding day.

The next frame, however, was empty. The strangeness of this made me queasy. I ran a finger tentatively over the glass. For the life of me, I couldn’t remember what had been there.

The next picture was of the girls flying a kite in Golden Gate Park. They looked so small under that sky.

Then came another from the wedding, Gil and I alone on the church steps. Something was wrong here as well. Oh. Gil was headless.

What had he done?

I ran to the kitchen, crouched before a low cabinet, and threw open its door. We kept piles of random paperwork here, paid utility bills and warranties, my night-class term papers and a few short stories I’d written, and the girls’ growing childhood ephemera.

Mine, too: a robot novel I wrote at age nine, an assigned autobiography from eighth grade. The girls’ stuff all seemed to be intact. Mine, however, was missing.

I opened the next cabinet, looking for our family photographs, and was relieved to see all the albums neatly stacked. I removed a shoebox that held more recent snapshots. Most were of our daughters: sleeping, bathing, eating, playing.

I dumped the contents onto the floor and sifted through, unable to tell if anything was missing. I came upon a shot of Gil and me mutilated in the same way as the wedding photo in the living room, his head cleanly scissored out.

Eyeing the stacked albums with dread, I pulled out our wedding book. Slowly I turned its pages. He’d cut his head out of several photos.

If he’d sliced me away, it would’ve made a horrible kind of sense, but this? It was so disturbing.

Here now was a picture of Vinnie and me at the reception, standing near the dance floor, long before we’d fallen in love. My image was unharmed, but Gil had repeatedly stabbed something into Vinnie’s neck. His wrath was palpable.

A shiver of fear for Vinnie’s safety ran through me.

The missing print in the living room, I suddenly remembered, was of me as a child. That smell of fire. Those bits of paper. Had he…? No. He wouldn’t.

I slid out my baby album and opened it up. Every photo was gone.

Mom’s old albums were next. She’d given them to me for safekeeping after selling the house in LA. I flipped through them. My arms grew heavy, my fingers numb.

All those ancient black-and-white photos with scalloped edges and sepia stains – gone.

Portraits of my grandparents that I knew so well, snapshots of aunts and uncles and cousins, everyone gathered at backyard barbecues with drinks in their hands and smiling faces – gone. Shots of Daddy in knickers, in his Air Force uniform. Mom in a saggy-bottomed woolen swimsuit, lined up with her siblings on the sand at Rockaway. All gone. Gil had destroyed everything.

One last item remained in the cabinet. My strongbox. My pulse quickened. No, no, no, no.

I pulled the box out, set it in my lap, and entered the combination, 6-5-3, Gil’s height and mine. The lock tumbled.

I removed birth certificates, bank books and rental agreements, the pink slips for our cars.

At the bottom sat a brown letter-sized envelope. Inside it I’d kept a love letter from 1973 and a Polaroid photograph of a little golden-haired baby. My son. The boy I’d spent just one hour with before I was forced to give him up for adoption at 16.

I opened the flap. The envelope was empty. I doubled over, wailing. Then clapped a hand to my mouth. Don’t wake the girls, I thought. Don’t scare them. Tears ran down my cheeks. They dripped from my fingers and chin.

Gil had custom-designed this punishment, this erasure, laying waste to my childhood artifacts, my stabs at writing, my family’s history.

Out of sheer malevolence he’d burned the only photograph I had of my son.

I struggled to my feet. My knees wobbled, and I felt like I might fall.

I hurried now to the bedroom, where the girls lay on their sides, backs touching. Oh, the curve of Erin’s cheek. Amy’s toddler snores. My daughters were right here. I scooted Amy over and slid in. I needed sleep – everything would look different after sleep. In the morning I’d call Vinnie and we’d decide together what to do next.

I awoke two hours later, a rosy sunrise creeping through the bedroom window. Automatically, I headed to the kitchen.

The cabinet’s contents still littered the floor, so I started a pot of coffee, and I put everything back. I poured a cup and sat. Another day. My mind emptied.

When I heard the girls stirring, I got up and filled a pot of water for oatmeal.

A bullet sat dead center between the stove’s burners. It looked like the world’s tiniest missile.

It was a message from Gil. A promise. A plan.

Excerpted from She’s Under Here: A Memoir by Karen Palmer. Used with permission of Algonquin Books, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.