Why My Friend’s Surprise Marriage Raised So Many Red Flags

And how I tried to help her escape

A palette of yarns from the author’s textile studio

Camille and I met in the spring of 2010 as designers at a textile studio in New York City, an airy space where we bonded over a shared love of color, texture, and pattern. She was French, raised in the picturesque countryside, and I’m Guyanese-Indian from a New Jersey suburb. Despite the differences in our origin stories, we connected. We both had difficult relationships with our fathers and creative careers our families didn’t understand. We dreamt of life beyond our day jobs, and brainstormed business ideas we didn’t have the time or money to start. We were both five feet tall, in our late twenties, and on the brink of transformation.

Like everyone in the office, I was enchanted by Camille’s French cachet and international circle of friends. Her wardrobe was filled with brands I couldn’t pronounce, and her unfussy yet elegant look was impossible to emulate. She was self-deprecating about her English, but I was too busy enjoying her accent to notice any gaps in her grammar.

Over the next four years, I learned that she was a New Age mystic who loved yoga, health food, and tarot. She was the only person I knew who consumed kefir, kombucha, and fermented vegetables. Camille believed she was clairvoyant and took classes to hone her skills. I would’ve judged these interests in anyone else. But in her, they were charming. In a city full of skeptics, she was a shameless believer.

Knowing her trust in fate, I wasn’t entirely shocked by her sudden marriage to a man she’d only known for two weeks. By then, she’d returned to France, and we’d become long distance friends, emailing and Skyping as often as we could. She was on holiday in New York when she met the Writer, as we called him. In those days, all her new beaus got nicknames. I remember rolling my eyes when she told me he was 20 years older.

The situation seemed harmless, another chapter in the exciting life of a single friend. But days later, an email arrived with the subject line “Big News.” The message described an urban legend: a first date that lasted for hours, a deep spiritual connection, a whirlwind proposal, and City Hall ceremony. There would be a party in the fall, and she hoped my husband and I could make it. She’d always said weddings were an American craze, and that marriage wasn’t a priority for the French. The Writer had clearly made a convincing grand gesture.

While I was happy to have Camille back in the city, my gut reaction was fear. He was a stranger old enough to be her father. She was in her mid-thirties and had always wanted children. The situation seemed more like a Woody Allen script than the life I’d imagined for a dear friend.

Camille was talented, gorgeous, and magnetic. I’d seen many men fall in love with her over the years, but this proposal was well-timed. The marriage would allow her to remain stateside, start her company, and follow the dreams we had talked about so often. I focused on these tangible outcomes as I sent her my congratulations, praying she remained as wildly happy as she claimed to be.

About two months into the marriage, Camille and I met for lunch before Labor Day weekend. I thought we would discuss the details of her wedding celebration, which was a few weeks away. But the conversation that ensued wasn’t about dresses or table settings.

Over plates of endive salad, I watched her features crumple as Camille admitted that things were not what they had seemed. We had cried in front of each other countless times. But this was different. There was real fear in her voice. I offered for her to stay in my apartment while my husband and I visited his parents for the long weekend. She was hesitant but agreed to take some space and consider what she wanted to do next.

I felt like we were in a movie as we left the restaurant and headed to SoHo. While she ran upstairs to collect her belongings, I was on the lookout for the Writer, a middle-aged white man I’d only seen via Google image search. I had no idea what to do if I encountered him. Block him from entering the building? Punch him in the nose? I had no framework for this scenario.

Hurriedly, we loaded her things into the trunk of a cab. As we sped up the West Side Highway, Camille called her husband to tell him she was leaving. I didn’t think this was a good idea, but she wanted him to know. His rage reverberated from her cell phone into the backseat. Her face was flushed as she begged for him to calm down and listen. If my blood was pumping, I could only imagine the pace of her heartbeat. My whole body was tense as I tried to shut out their fraught exchange. As wind whipped through the open windows, I focused on the outline of the George Washington Bridge in the distance, a sign that we were almost to safety.

After Camille was settled at my apartment uptown, I boarded a plane at JFK feeling hopeful. Her marriage had been impulsive, but it wasn’t too late to undo. I imagined us in the not-too-distant future, laughing about the whole disaster over glasses of Côtes du Rhône. But he texted and called all weekend, ensuring she had no peace or emotional distance.

On Monday morning, they met in a park downtown to talk. I can only imagine what he said, the promises he made. It had taken my own mother two tries to leave my father; he too had been loving and persuasive when he needed to be. In both cases, I could only observe from the outside, waiting and hoping. But by the time I got home, she was gone.

The wedding celebration was canceled, but somehow, the marriage endured. After Camille moved back in with her husband, we continued to see each other, but I began to dread our visits. Even if we weren’t speaking about him directly, his dark shadow was always present. There was no place for banter about food, design or music. We no longer took turns venting, offering solace, and making each other laugh. Outwardly, she was unchanged, but I could hear in her voice and see in her eyes—the lightness was gone. Camille was contorting to fit the hard, incongruent edges of her marriage, shape-shifting for her own survival.

As a kid, I’d watched my mother mute herself, keeping her opinions and desires quiet so as not to upset my father. But she could never make herself small enough; he only found more obscure reasons to be angry. It was painful to witness Camille undergo a similar transformation.

One of the last times I saw her was in the winter of 2015. We met at a patisserie near the studio where we had once been coworkers, which felt like another lifetime. Over mugs of herbal tea, she spoke about ending her life, her gray-blue eyes distant. I didn’t know what to say. I had helped her escape once, but only she could help herself now. Worse still, I had my own news to share, news I’d been holding for months, never finding the right moment. Before we parted, I finally told Camille I was pregnant with my first child, the boy she had once predicted.

“I figured,” she said.

Her cold reaction stung. I missed the friend who would’ve hugged me and asked how I was feeling. The friend who would’ve taught me French lullabies and taken me shopping for block-printed onesies and handmade quilts. When she declined the invite to my baby shower, I felt guilty for being upset, knowing her situation. The truth was, I welcomed motherhood, but I too was scared of the future I had chosen. Like her, I needed support. But that was something she couldn’t give.

About a year after our fateful lunch, I saw Camille crossing the intersection of Eighth Avenue and 23rd Street. In a crowd of pedestrians, I recognized her long sandy hair and graceful stride. Part of me wanted to wave and call her name, to have a five-minute conversation on the street corner, to sit for a cup of tea. I wanted to chat with her like we used to in the airy studio, imagining our futures. But we weren’t those young women anymore. I was a mother now, my life crowded with new love and new worries. My heart made a quick calculation, and my body kept moving. I walked north, and she walked south. We passed each other as strangers.

A few years later, Camille emailed to tell me she was getting a divorce. By then, the only signs of her in my life were, appropriately, two pieces of kantha-style hand embroidery she’d brought me back from a trip to India.

A piece of hand embroidery from India, a gift from Camille

Her message arrived like a shock wave through my own stress and exhaustion, bringing me back to that time in our lives. She asked me to write a letter of support summarizing the day I had tried to help her leave her husband.

“Our friendship waned during the course of her marriage,” I wrote. “But I was aware of her many challenges in trying to make it work. She tried her best, but it was not a feasible long-term relationship.”

I had the letter notarized at a bank near my office in Midtown and mailed it to her new address on the other side of the country. I would never know how she survived her marriage, or what finally empowered her to leave. Our friendship was over, but closure came with knowing that years after that cab ride up the West Side Highway, she was finally free.

Sumitra Mattai is a writer, storyteller and textile designer based in New York City. She holds a BFA in Textile Design from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA in Creative Writing from The New School. Her essays have been shared in Huffington Post, Scary Mommy, and Lit Magazine, among others. For more information, visit her website, www.sumitramattai.com, find her on Instagram @sumitramattai, or check out her newsletter, Clothbound, about textiles in art, design and everyday life.