Content warning: This post deals with domestic violence, and may be triggering for some readers.
Today, Valentine’s Day, people everywhere will be gifted with red roses.
Vases will be fetched from cupboards, and promptly filled with water.
For most accounts, that will be an act of love and celebration – one that acknowledges a caring, happy, vibrant relationship.
But that will not be everybody today.
For some, the flowers they will receive do not represent brightness. They represent something far more sinister. Something powerful in its darkness and brutality. Something menacing and breathlessly cruel.
For some, flowers represent ‘Sorry’ for the violence of the night before.
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It was Tuesday, September 25, 2012, and Simone O’Brien was steeling herself to break off her engagement with Glenn Cable, a local real estate agent she met online.
From the exterior, the pair from Horsham, in Victoria’s west, were a happy couple. Glenn was affectionate and, from time to time, would show this materially as most partners do; promising his fiancée handbags and dinner dates. Despite Glenn’s displays of ‘love’, Simone was uneasy.
“I just had this gut feeling that I had to get out of the relationship,” Simone tells me some four years on. “Money was being stolen, the messages and contacts on my phone were being deleted, I was blaming my son that he had lost his technology and games – but it turns out he [Cable] was taking them and selling them.”