Lace & Blades began on the nights I did not know whether I would survive the man I loved.
Before there was a book, a website, a publisher or a campaign, there were words written by a frightened woman who was trying to keep hold of her own mind.
They were not beautiful words, carefully shaped for strangers to read and they were not written with a publishing contract in sight or the faintest belief that one day they would sit between the covers of a book. They were frantic diary entries, broken memories, dates, messages, questions, things I had been told, things I had been made to believe and truths I was still too frightened to say aloud. Some were written while my body was rigid with fear, some after the latest apology had left me doubting whether I had imagined the cruelty, and some because a quiet part of me understood that I needed to leave a trail back to myself before his version of reality swallowed mine completely.
I was not trying to become an author.
I was trying not to disappear.
That is where Lace & Blades began, not at a desk surrounded by publishing plans, but inside the confusion of loving a man who was slowly teaching me to fear him. The title came from the contradiction I was living every day, the lace being everything soft and beautiful that had drawn me towards him, the attention, flowers, intimacy, promises and the feeling of finally being understood, while the blade was what waited underneath it, the manipulation, intimidation, sexual violence, coercive control and the calculated use of everything he had learned about me when I believed I was safe enough to be vulnerable.
Abuse did not walk into my life looking dangerous. It walked in looking like rescue.
It listened to what had hurt me before, told me I deserved better and made me feel seen at a time when I had forgotten what that felt like. It called me beautiful, held my hand, made me laugh and spoke about a future with the kind of certainty that made me believe I had finally found somewhere emotionally safe to land. There was no obvious monster standing in front of me. There was a man who knew how to be charming, attentive and convincing, a man who understood that control works best when it is first mistaken for devotion.
The questions did not feel like interrogation at the beginning, they sounded like genuine interest. The jealousy did not immediately feel threatening because it was framed as fear of losing me. The need to know where I was, who I was speaking to and why I had not replied quickly enough became part of the relationship so gradually that I adjusted to each new demand before I had time to recognise how much of myself I was surrendering. That is how coercive control works. It doesn’t tear your freedom away in one dramatic moment, it moves the walls quietly, inch by inch, until you suddenly realise that every decision you make is being filtered through the question of how he might react.
I did not wake up one morning and calmly tell myself that I was in an abusive relationship. Real life is not that clean, and victims are rarely given the clarity people imagine they should have. There were good days between the terrible ones, affection placed carefully beside cruelty and apologies arriving whenever I was close to seeing him clearly. Each time I reached the edge of the truth, he gave me just enough of the man from the beginning to pull me back.
I thought I was in love with a damaged man. I believed he was angry because he had been hurt, jealous because he cared and controlling because he was frightened of losing me. I told myself that patience would reach him, loyalty would reassure him and love would eventually calm whatever storm lived inside him. I spent so long searching for the pain beneath his behaviour that I almost lost sight of the pain he was deliberately creating inside me.
That is the answer people rarely expect when they ask why a victim stays.
She stayed because the abuse did not begin with violence, because he had already built himself into her hopes before he began dismantling her confidence, because every explosion was followed by remorse, tenderness and the promise that this time would be different. She stayed because leaving someone you are trauma bonded to does not feel like stepping calmly away from danger. It’s more a feeling of tearing your own heart out while the person holding the knife tells you that you are the one causing the wound.
I played things down because admitting the truth would have forced me to face what might need to happen next. I explained away warning signs, defended behaviour that frightened me and turned cruelty into another bad day because the alternative was accepting that the person I loved was not losing control, he was using it. I held tightly to the memory of who he had been at the beginning and waited for that man to return.
He did not return.
Eventually, I understood that he had not disappeared at all. The version of him I had fallen in love with had served its purpose. He had created the attachment, learned my vulnerabilities and made himself feel essential before allowing the mask to slip.
The man from the beginning was the bait.
That truth broke something inside me because it meant grieving not only the relationship I had lost, but the relationship I had never truly had. The love I felt was real because my feelings were real. The safety he offered was not. That distinction is one of the cruellest things a survivor may ever have to accept.
In January 2025, my life split into before and after.
I was raped by my then-partner.
There is no gentle way to write that sentence, and there should not be. It should land with the weight it carried into my life. It was not an unfortunate moment inside a troubled relationship. It was not a misunderstanding, crossed boundary or private difficulty. The man I loved violated me, and afterwards I was left trying to understand how somebody could survive that level of betrayal while still carrying an attachment to the person who had caused it.
People like trauma to behave logically. They want the victim to stop loving immediately, leave immediately, report immediately and speak with perfect clarity about something her mind may still be struggling to process. They want fear without attachment, pain without confusion and a survivor whose behaviour makes sense to people who have never spent a single night trapped inside coercive control.
Real trauma does not perform so neatly.
My mind was not a courtroom transcript. It was fragments, sensations, dread, disbelief and the unbearable collision between what had happened and what part of me still wanted to believe about him. I wrote because trauma was making memory feel unstable and because I feared that shame, denial and his version of events might one day bury mine. I wrote because my body knew the truth before my heart was ready to live with or accept it.
The pages began to grow. Incidents that had once seemed separate started joining together – the insults, monitoring, intimidation, sexual violence, apologies and periods of calm began forming a pattern that was impossible to dismiss once I saw it laid out in front of me. The writing did not make what happened easier to bear. It made it harder to lie to myself about.
Leaving did not bring the clean ending people imagine when they tell victims to “just go”.
There was no final door closing behind me, followed by instant safety and a triumphant beginning. Leaving challenged his control, and when an abusive man realises that charm is no longer enough to keep a woman in place, danger can sharpen. The relationship may have ended, yet the fear, threats, intimidation and possibility of retaliation do not disappear because the victim has done what everyone told her she should do.
There were police officers, advocates, evidence, safeguarding concerns, court proceedings, a restraining order and a very real fear of what could happen next. I was assessed as high risk – the danger now was not hidden, imagined or known only to me. It existed in records, professional discussions and the weight of evidence surrounding my case.
Still, I had to fight to find somewhere safe to live.
That sentence should shame people in power.
A woman can be told that she is at serious risk while still being expected to remain within the geography of that danger. She can have police involvement, advocacy, evidence and professionals expressing concern for her safety, yet still find herself pushed into ordinary housing processes that move at the speed of administration rather than the speed of fear. She can be employed, paying her own way and appearing capable, while privately understanding that the address attached to her life may also be the place from which she is easiest to find.
I was working, I could answer emails, put on makeup, speak to people and create the illusion that I was coping. That did not mean I was safe. Employment did not reduce the threat against me. Income did not create a protective barrier around my home. Looking functional did not stop me from calculating risk, watching over my shoulder or wondering whether the systems around me understood that danger does not become less urgent simply because the woman facing it has a job.
The council could recognise me as vulnerable while still expecting me to carry almost every practical burden of becoming safe.
That was when my story stopped being only about the man who abused me. It became about everything I discovered after him, the systems that could document danger without removing it, the processes that could speak fluently about safeguarding while leaving a victim waiting, and the exhausting expectation that victims must coordinate their own survival while traumatised.
At first, I had written because I was trying to save myself. Somewhere along the way, I began seeing other women between the lines.
They were there in every excuse I had made for him, every warning sign I had softened and every moment I had protected his reputation at the expense of my own safety. They were there in the shame of missing somebody dangerous, the confusion of still loving someone who had caused fear and the constant mental gymnastics needed to make an abusive relationship feel survivable for one more day.
I began to understand that another woman might read one of those pages and recognise herself. She might see her partner’s constant monitoring described clearly and realise that it was not love, or read about trauma bonding and finally understand why she had returned, or see the excuses she had been making written by somebody else and feel, perhaps for the first time, that she was not weak, foolish or alone.
The first step out is not a quick dramatic escape, it could be a woman sitting quietly with words that make her stomach drop because somebody has finally named what she has been living.
Oh my God. That is what is happening to me.
Recognition does not end abuse, but it can break the first hole in the reality an abuser has constructed around his victim.
That is why I stopped protecting him and began telling the truth.
I stopped editing the language to make him sound less dangerous. I stopped carrying shame that belonged to him, trying to make what happened easier for other people to hear. My silence had never protected me. It had protected him.
Lace & Blades: A Survivor’s Story was published by Grosvenor House Publishing on 14 May 2026, although the book had been written through many nights when I had no idea whether those words would ever leave the pages where I had hidden them. It records domestic abuse, sexual violence, coercive control, trauma bonding, court, fear and the complicated work of rebuilding after somebody has deliberately damaged your understanding of love and safety.
It is not a polished story about overcoming adversity and it certainly does not turn trauma into a soft-focus quotation and place it against a beautiful sunset. It does not make abuse noble, tidy or inspirational for the comfort of the reader. It is uncomfortable because the truth was uncomfortable. It is emotional because I loved him. It is angry because he hurt me. It is raw because anything softer would have protected the wrong person.
Before the book was published, the Lace & Blades website went live on 10 April 2026. I had imagined it as somewhere to gather support links, writing and information connected to my story. It was, in the beginning, an attempt to organise some of the chaos of my mind into a place that made sense.
It did not stay small for long.
People arrived looking for answers to questions I understood too well. They were searching for information about coercive control, stalking, trauma bonding, sexual violence, legal processes, housing, reporting, recovery and the confusing aftermath of leaving. They wanted to know why they still missed the person who hurt them, why they froze, why they did not report immediately and why fear remained lodged in the body long after the relationship had ended – my inbox exploded.
They were not always ready to telephone a service or declare themselves a victim. Many were still trying to understand whether what had happened to them counted as abuse.
Lace & Blades developed into the place I had needed when I was living inside that uncertainty. It became a survivor-led awareness, support and signposting hub, not because I believe lived experience replaces trained professionals, but because I know there is often a painful distance between sensing that something is wrong and being able to explain why help is needed.
The website lives inside that distance. It speaks to the woman who is still making excuses, the woman who has left but does not feel safe, the woman trying to understand court processes while carrying trauma, and the woman who looks perfectly capable from the outside while privately holding together the pieces of a life somebody else tried to destroy.
My experience also exposed the housing gap that became Georgia’s Law Wales.
Georgia’s Law Wales grew from the reality of being assessed as high risk while discovering that urgent safe housing could still be treated as an ordinary administrative problem. It grew from the absurdity of expecting a woman to remain in an area connected to known danger because her employment or income made her situation more difficult to fit into existing systems.
The campaign asks that high-risk domestic abuse, sexual violence, stalking and intimidation cases are treated as safeguarding emergencies rather than routine homelessness applications. It is built upon a truth that should never have required a political fight: a salary does not stop an abusive man, employment does not make a victim less vulnerable and risk does not disappear because a woman can continue paying her bills.
The book told the story of what happened to me.
Georgia’s Law Wales asks what must change because of it.
I also fully support Rhiannon’s Law, which is a separate survivor-led campaign and is not mine. Its demand that identity, criminal history and safeguarding information are checked properly, preserved accurately and shared lawfully speaks to the same wider reality exposed through so many women’s experiences: known danger is repeatedly allowed to become fragmented between systems, then the victim is left carrying the consequences when those systems fail to join the information together.
My support for that campaign comes from solidarity, not ownership. Different women can emerge from different failures and still recognise the same institutional pattern, the warning signs were there, the risk was known somewhere, yet action came too slowly or not at all.
By the summer of 2026, Lace & Blades had become far more than the book I never intended to write. It had grown into a survivor-led platform for awareness, signposting and safeguarding reform, built carefully from the lessons I had learned in the most brutal way possible.
None of it came from wanting my identity to be permanently tied to what a man did to me.
It came from refusing to let what he did remain useless.
Victims are still asked why they stayed, why they returned, why they loved him, why they froze, why they continued working, why they smiled in photographs and why they did not behave like the perfect victim somebody else had imagined. They are expected to remember trauma in exact order, report it immediately and display their devastation in a form that feels convincing without making anybody too uncomfortable.
Enough.
Survival is not a performance, and a victim does not owe the world a visibly shattered face before she deserves to be believed.
From the outside, I may have looked like I was coping. That appearance made life easier for everybody watching. It did not make me safe. Mascara can conceal a great deal when a woman has learned to keep working, smiling, speaking and functioning while every ugly part of her life is pushed somewhere private.
This story is every red flag I explained away, every instinct I silenced, every apology I wanted to believe and every courtroom I walked into carrying the weight of what somebody else had done to me. It is every system that knew there was danger, every night I wondered whether safety would ever feel real again and every part of myself I have had to recover from the wreckage.
He tried to make my life smaller.
Instead, I built something larger than either of us.
I turned the words I had written in fear into a published record. I turned that record into a website. I turned the failures surrounding my survival into a campaign asking why a woman assessed as high risk should ever be left waiting for safety.
This is not the story of a woman being rescued.
It is the story of a woman crawling out of hell while still wounded, learning how to stand again and then leaving a light behind for somebody who may still be trapped in the darkness of hell.
Healing has not been graceful by any means. It has carried anger, grief, faith, exhaustion, fear and a stubborn refusal to allow the worst thing that happened to me to decide who I would become afterwards.
Occasionally the words a victim writes simply to keep herself alive become the same words that help another woman realise that she is worth saving.
That is why Lace & Blades exists.
That is why the website exists.
That is why Georgia’s Law Wales exists.
That is why I will keep speaking, fighting and shouting.
This is not simply a book about surviving abuse. It is a warning from inside the relationship, a record of what came afterwards and proof that the woman he tried to silence survived long enough to tell the truth.
Grateful thanks to Grosvenor House Publishing for their support in publishing Lace & Blades and helping share this important story.