On the Night Before Her Doctoral Defense, Her Husband Cut Her Hair by Force, but at the Appearance of Her Father, His Face Lost Its Color

On the night before my doctoral defense, my husband threw me onto the floor and cut my hair by force while his mother held my arms by the shoulders.

The kitchen clock showed eleven at night. Rain struck the windows, while my defense diagrams lay on the table, with red marks and eight years of work on every page. I went downstairs to drink water when I heard Hunter and Barbara’s quiet conversation.

As soon as they saw me, they fell silent.

Barbara held a glass in her hand and looked at me as if I were the uninvited guest in this house.

“You are not going to the university tomorrow,” she said.

“I am going,” I answered and swallowed the fear that had formed in my throat. “Tomorrow is the defense of my paper.”

Hunter smiled bitterly.

“Were eight years not enough? You have a husband, Elene. You should have a family, not these ridiculous academic dreams.”

Behind him, my old object hung on the refrigerator door—a small wooden clip on which a mountain bird had been carved. Father had given it to me when I first entered the university. On every difficult day I looked at it and told myself that I could still fly high.

“This is not a dream,” I told him. “My paper has already been approved by the committee.”

Barbara snickered.

“A diploma does not make a woman humble. On the contrary, it puts her above her husband.”

I looked at Hunter. Once, when I received my first scholarship, he had embraced me. I remembered how he told me that my mind was the most beautiful thing about me. Now there was only resentment and something darker in his eyes.

“I am not going to argue about this,” I said and turned toward the door.

I took two steps.

Hunter grabbed my arms.

“Let me go.”

“I am not finished yet.”

His fingers tightened around me. Barbara stood behind me and gripped my shoulders. The cold edges of her rings scratched my skin.

“Now you will understand where your place is,” she whispered.

Hunter took scissors from the counter.

My heart froze.

“Hunter, what are you doing?”

He smiled. This was not the person with whom I had lived for seven years.

“I am teaching you not to disgrace our family name.”

The first curl fell onto the floor. The metallic sound of the scissors grew louder with every movement. I screamed, cursed, and begged, but Barbara held me more strongly.

“The committee will not take you seriously tomorrow,” she said. “You will stay home and tell everyone that you are sick.”

“Help!” I shouted.

Hunter whispered in my ear:

“If you call the police, I will tell everyone that you are psychologically unstable.”

When they finally let me go, I barely reached the bathroom. In the mirror I saw unevenly cut hair, a reddened neck, and a woman who had been deprived of freedom within the walls of her own home.

I cried for a long time.

Then the tears stopped.

I returned to the writing desk, put the paper in my bag, took the dark-blue suit, and wrote one message to my father on the phone: “If you can, come to the university in the morning. Something very bad happened.”

He answered immediately: “I will be there.”

At dawn I combed my hair as best I could. I attached the wooden bird clip to the handle of my bag and quietly left the house.

My father was supposed to meet me near the university security room, but only his lawyer was standing there. He was holding a black folder.

“Your father told me to open this only if you dared to come to the defense,” he told me.

My hand moved toward the folder. My fingers touched the clasp when a door opened at the end of the corridor and I heard Hunter’s voice…

I was about to open the folder when Hunter appeared in the corridor. His shirt was un-ironed, but the same confident smile was still written on his face.

“Elene, go back home,” he told me. “You can still end all this quietly.”

The lawyer stepped in front of me.

“Mr. Hunter, do not approach my client.”

“She is my wife.”

“And precisely for that reason, you should know that everything you say and do is being recorded.”

Hunter looked at my hair and chuckled quietly.

“Tell the committee that you lost your mind. You will make everyone believe it.”

I dug my fingernails into the edges of the folder. Something heavy was inside, several papers and a small memory card.

At that moment my father entered. He was holding a wet umbrella and his face was unusually tense.

“Hunter,” he said, “today you will have to listen to me for the first time.”

Hunter laughed.

“You decide nothing here.”

Father looked directly at him.

“You will understand that soon.”

I entered the defense room. Three members of the committee were sitting at the table. Barbara was there too, as if she were not a witness to a family quarrel but an honored guest.

The chair looked at my hair, then at Hunter, and finally at my father.

“Elene, are you ready?”

My father opened the folder.

“Before she begins, one matter must be clarified,” he said.

He placed the first sheet on the table.

Barbara’s smile disappeared.

Hunter grabbed the chair.

“You should not have this,” he whispered.

Father looked at me and said:

“Child, now tell them what you found in that financial report…”

“…Which financial report?” I asked, barely breaking the silence that had descended over the room.

Father took out the second document. The university stamp and two bank transfers were visible on the paper. Both had been made from my research grant.

“You did not touch this money,” he told me. “But they used your name.”

Hunter jumped up.

“This is nonsense!”

“Sit down,” the chair of the committee said sternly.

Barbara looked at me, pale.

“Elene, you misunderstood. We only borrowed it temporarily.”

“For three years?” I asked. “One hundred and twenty-two thousand lari ‘temporarily’?”

Father took the memory card from the folder and inserted it into the laptop. A camera recording appeared on the screen. Hunter was standing in my office and entering my computer. Then Barbara appeared. She was holding a copy of my electronic signature.

Her voice sounded in the recording:

“If Elene defends her paper tomorrow, everything will be over. The committee will realize that the money went into her research.”

Hunter answered:

“She will not defend it. I will take care of it.”

No one in the room was breathing.

Hunter looked at the screen and stepped back.

“This is edited.”

Father placed another sheet down.

“An independent expert confirmed the authenticity of the recording. In addition, there are bank statements, forged signatures, and your emails in which you talk to a buyer about selling research data.”

Barbara pulled the chair so forcefully that its wooden leg scraped across the floor.

“We were protecting the family,” she said.

“No,” I answered. “You were stealing my life.”

The chair of the committee looked at my paper.

“Elene, you can continue the defense. It is now clear that pressure was being exerted against you.”

Hunter moved toward me.

“You will regret this. If you destroy my life, I will destroy yours too.”

Father raised his hand and the security officers entered. But before they took Hunter away, a message arrived on my phone from an unknown number: “Your father did not tell you everything. This evening the second part of the evidence will appear.”

Then I looked at Father. He lowered his eyes.

“What did you not tell me?” I asked.

He could not answer me.

At that very moment a call came to his phone. He said only one sentence:

“No… they have already found that document.”

And I realized that Hunter and Barbara’s betrayal might have been greater than I had imagined…