Desmond was convicted on all major counts eighteen months later — conspiracy to commit assault, solicitation of violence, and fraud — receiving a sentence that ensured he would spend the better part of a decade unable to orchestrate anything at all. Priscilla, given her cooperation, received probation and a considerably lighter sentence for her more limited role, though her own reputation within their shared social circle never recovered from the trial's public record.
I underwent three additional reconstructive surgeries over the following two years. The scarring along my jaw and cheek remains visible, a permanent, undeniable record of exactly what Desmond had been willing to do to protect his own reputation rather than simply tell me the truth.
I stopped, eventually, trying to hide it.
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I built, in the years that followed, a foundation supporting survivors of targeted violence within intimate relationships — the particular, devastating category of harm that doesn't always fit neatly into either "domestic violence" or "random crime," but sits somewhere considerably more calculated in between. We fund forensic investigation support for survivors whose own police departments initially dismiss their suspicion that an attack wasn't actually random, the way mine nearly was before Detective Anand took my account seriously.
I named it, deliberately, after the exact sentence Desmond had spoken standing beside my hospital bed, believing I was unconscious and would never know what he'd actually said.
Who Would Want Her became, once I finished building something considerably larger than the man who'd asked it, a question with an entirely different answer than the one he'd assumed.
