If you have ever asked yourself, “How did I end up here?” this book was written for you.
If you work with survivors of coercive control and post-separation abuse, this book was written for you, too.
Before the lawyers. Before the courts. Before the ECHR complaint. There was a dream.
In 2009, recently widowed and searching for connection, Ann Loraine Marshall met a man who seemed to be everything she had written on a list. Kind. Generous. Strong. A soul mate. What followed was eleven years of future faking, coercive control, financial abuse, and systematic dismantling of everything she had built, so carefully constructed that she didn’t have the words for it until long after it ended.
The Dream I Was Sold is the prequel to After The Discard – No Divorce Required. Written from the clarity of 2026, with diary entries, emails, journal notes and recorded conversations as evidence, it traces the relationship from its love-bombed beginning to the moment on a Spanish porch when four sentences
ended eleven years.
This is not a story about weakness. It is a documented account of how intelligent, capable women are targeted, isolated and controlled, and what it looks like from the inside when you finally have the words to name it.