Leaving My Fiancé, Losing My Faith, and Finding Freedom

An excerpt from All That’s Unseen by Emilee Hackney

“Hey, where’s your ring?”

Jeremy sat on the counter in front of the microwave. He was supposed to be finishing up the day’s dishes.

“Sold it,” I said. I was crouched in front of the open oven, steel wool in one hand, degreaser in the other. Ten minutes of spraying and scrubbing had barely made a difference on the greasy orange glass.

“Sold it?” Jeremy echoed. “Ain’t you supposed to be getting married?”

I sighed. Sam had gone to jail only two months earlier, but it felt like a lifetime ago. “Not anymore.”

“Well, shit,” Jeremy said. “What happened?”

I was surprised by Jeremy’s attentiveness, that he’d ever even noticed my engagement ring in the first place, let alone that I wasn’t wearing it anymore. Even when he wasn’t high, he was usually off in his own world, humming or daydreaming or doodling on the back of the notepad we used for catering orders.

“Sam went to jail,” I said, still scrubbing. “For child porn.”

I was too embarrassed to disclose that fact to most people, but for some reason I told Jeremy without hesitation. It was still a shock that I’d spent four and a half years, most of my adolescence, with a man who’d been preying on girls even younger than me, and even more a shock that I’d discovered this only when he was arrested days before our wedding.

Jeremy’s mouth hung open. “You’re shitting me.”

“I wish.”

Jeremy’s face hardened. He balled up the dishrag in his fist and squeezed. “I fucking hate motherfucking pedos, man. Scum of the earth,” he mumbled. I’d never seen him look so serious. After a moment his voice got softer, and his eyes followed. “I hate that that happened to you.”

“Yeah. Me, too.” I started to say something about how it was part of God’s plan, but didn’t. I’d heard that phrase a thousand times over the years: God uses all things for your good. I wasn’t sure I still believed that. In the dark reverence of a church sanctuary, it was easy to glorify pain, assign it a divine purpose. I was trying to cling to the idea that there was a reason for my hurt and heartbreak, that I was becoming stronger, but I wasn’t convinced. So I said nothing and kept scrubbing.

Jeremy still seemed bothered. He sat on the counter and swung his legs, passing the balled-up dishcloth from one hand to the other, while he stared out the storefront window into the dark. It wasn’t like him to be so quiet. Finally I asked what was on his mind.

“There’s somewhere I wanna take you,” he said.

“Where?” I asked.

“It’s a surprise,” he said, hopping down from the counter with a clunk. He always wore steel-toed boots to work. “It’ll be fun. Let’s hurry up and get out of here.”

And for the first time ever, Jeremy washed all the dishes without my prompting.

After we locked up, we headed toward the parking lot. It was empty except for our cars. My old Subaru was nothing to look at, but Jeremy’s Honda was comically hideous. Every surface—hood, roof, trunk, and doors—was banged and scratched and dented, as if someone had beaten the car with a baseball bat. It was spray-painted matte black, but the patchier spots revealed the original silver underneath. The hubcaps were missing. The tires were so bald that the wires peeked through. The back windshield was busted out and covered in purple Saran wrap.

“I call her the Baby Car,” Jeremy said. He ducked through the driver’s side window feetfirst, explaining that the door was permanently jammed. “Because she’s so tiny.” His knees splayed to each side of the steering wheel. “Death trap” was the phrase that came to mind, but I stooped inside anyway.

Jeremy stuck the key in the ignition. Before he turned it, he warned me to cover my ears, saying something about a straight pipe, which meant nothing to me. I cupped my hands over my ears. He turned the key. The engine came to life with a violent shudder and monstrous ripping roar that made me jump in my seat. Jeremy grinned so big I could see all of his teeth. The Baby Car quaked as it idled, and when he shifted into first gear, it gave an explosive lurch forward.

“Where’s the seat belt?” I yelled over the noise.

“What?” Jeremy yelled back.

“SEAT BELT!”

Jeremy grinned bigger.

We rolled out of the parking lot and onto the road. When Jeremy hit the gas, the car somehow got louder. He saw the look on my face and threw his head back in a laugh I couldn’t hear.

The sun was long set and the town was dead, but I still felt conspicuous in that ugly, blaring hunk of metal. A couple months earlier it would have been unthinkable for me to be in a car alone with a man other than my fiancé. Now I was tearing through the night at full volume and full speed—Jeremy hit the highway doing 80—and no one knew where I was or what I was doing. I had no one to answer to. No one to make me feel guilty and dirty and sinful for having a male for a friend or riding in his car. Liberation seized my heart. I felt free and wild and terribly strange, doing something that would have once brought great consequences but now brought none at all.

We hit a stretch of empty highway. Far from houses and people now, Jeremy flipped a switch on the floorboard and brought the subwoofers in the trunk to life. The mirrors and dashboard vibrated. I could feel the bass in the pulps of my teeth.

Jeremy hadn’t stopped smiling. “HAVING FUN YET?” he yelled. I nodded and felt myself smiling, too.

Jeremy got off at the next exit and headed toward the lake. The road was narrow and winding and he took the curves way too fast, but I couldn’t bring myself to feel afraid. I let my long hair out of its modest bun. It whipped around in the rush of air, tangling into yellow knots, and I stuck my head out the window to let the cool wind assault my face.

Soon I started smelling water and fish. Jeremy slowed down when he hit a gravel road. He parked close to the lakeshore, right by the dock. When he cut the engine, the silence was so sudden and loud that my ears rang. Without the car’s vibrations to dictate my heartbeat, my chest felt hollowed out, abruptly and achingly empty.

For a while neither of us spoke. Slowly the frogs, which had been startled to silence by the noise, started peeping again. The black lake water lapped softly at the grassy shore. It was a cloudless night.

“Let’s look at the stars,” Jeremy whispered, climbing from his seat to the hood.

We reclined against the windshield and looked up at the sky. It was still weird to be in such proximity to someone who wasn’t Sam, so I gave Jeremy a wide berth, scooting as far as I could to the opposite side of the hood. The stars above us were as bright as the moon. Jeremy pointed out constellations. He traced them slowly with a tattooed finger. I followed along with my eyes.

“What else do you think’s out there?” he asked after a while.

“What do you mean?” I said. “Like aliens?”

“No,” he said. “Like God.”

“Oh.” That caught me off guard. I hesitated. “Why do you ask?”

Jeremy put both hands behind his head. His eyes were far away, beyond the sky.

“You seem like you would know,” he said. He turned his face to me after a moment, to the Jesus fish necklace resting on my chest. Even though it was a gift from Sam, I couldn’t bear to part with it.

Jeremy went on. “I think about it a lot. I mean, there’s gotta be something, right? The universe is so big and we’re so small . . .” 

He trailed off into deeper thought. “There’s gotta be something,” he said again finally. “Something bigger than us. I just don’t know what it is.”

I wasn’t sure how to respond. I hadn’t been expecting Jeremy—Jeremy, who was always high and giggly and lost in some faraway dreamworld—to pose a serious theological question. How did I explain God, creator and keeper of the universe? How did I explain God at all?

Despite a lifetime of church, I’d only ever had an abstract understanding of God. And now, after everything that had happened, after weeks of pain and fury and unanswered questions and prayers, I was completely unsure of who he was, what his role was in my life or anyone else’s.

“There’s something,” I affirmed very slowly. “But I’m not sure what it is either.”

It was the first time I’d ever doubted God’s existence aloud.

I half expected a lightning bolt to strike me dead that instant. But the cloudless sky stayed dark and quiet, and my blasphemy went unpunished. Jeremy laughed a little.

“I figured you’d give me a whole damn sermon,” he said. He scooted a hair closer to me. “Maybe you’re finally loosening up after all.”

I held my breath nervously, the way I always did when my Subway coworkers got too close. It was a knee-jerk reaction to keep from breathing in their sin. An absurd reaction, I realized then. I exhaled and then inhaled again, long and slow, as if to prove to myself that nothing bad was going to happen by breathing the same air as Jeremy.

The cool lake air filled my lungs. It was fishy and salty, sweet and biting. There was another smell, too, fainter—weed and old carpet, engine oil and cherry air freshener. The scent of Jeremy’s car and clothes. It was oddly soothing. I wanted to bottle it up. Take it home. Maybe even wear it myself.

I scooted an inch closer to Jeremy and breathed in deeply once more.

A few days later after a Wednesday night youth service, I went up to Pastor Will and asked for prayer.

“I need to hear from God,” I said vaguely. That was nowhere near the extent of what I really needed.

Since I’d admitted my doubt to Jeremy, it had grown and grown and grown, taking up more and more space in my mind until I hadn’t been able to think about anything else. Now it was unrestrained, a wild, creeping thing.

That Wednesday night prayer request was a desperate attempt to find something to still believe in. A God who was good in spite of all the terrors he inspired. A God who, in his incomprehensible wisdom, had orchestrated my life down to the very second, good parts and bad, for some great divine purpose. A God who was still in control.

Beneath that, and perhaps more urgently, I was searching for a connection to who I’d been just a couple months earlier. I felt severed from the core of what I’d unconsciously started to think of as my “old life,” which had revolved entirely around Sam and God. Without them, who was I?

Pastor Will stood in front of me and laid a hand on my head. Jared and Whitney and a few other youth group volunteers I was friends with circled around me, laying hands across my back and shoulders. At first their prayers were whispers, delicate and barely audible, but they grew louder with each sentence, until I was surrounded by half a dozen shouting voices commanding a renewal of the Holy Spirit inside me.

While the prayers flowed, I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to talk to God. I tried to force my own prayer, but my mind remained empty, as if I’d forgotten how to speak English. Surrounded by the most faithful people I knew, I felt more aware than ever that my own faith was beyond retrieval. Frustration rolled over me in a hot wave. I started to cry.

“Thank you, Father, for remaining steadfast in Emilee’s life.” Pastor Will mistook my tears as a sign that God was working inside me. “Even when she can’t hear you, I pray she always knows you’re there.”

The voices descended into a chorus of “amens” and the hands fell away. Whitney hugged me. Jared offered me a tissue.

“It’s going to be okay. God is always with you,” Whitney said. She paused, then spoke again more quietly. “I’m sure things have been hard lately.”

The subtle allusion to the breakup was more than anybody else had given me. Surprised, I could only nod.

“Sometimes it’s hard to hear God when you’re living outside his will,” Jared added. I sat down on the stage and wiped my face. He and Whitney sat down on either side of me. Pastor Will and my other friends took seats in the front row. “It’s like a check-engine light. Except instead of a neon sign, you feel overwhelming silence. You feel so, so far away from God. That’s because he’s trying to get your attention.”

I nodded at Jared. Overwhelming silence was exactly what I felt. It was an awfully cruel way to get someone’s attention, I thought. Yet I couldn’t say it hadn’t worked: I’d been thinking about God—raging at, pleading with, and doubting him—nonstop. It was just like when Sam gave me the silent treatment. I would stay on edge for days, worrying about what I’d done wrong and how to fix it. How to be better next time so I wouldn’t have to face the torturous silence again.

“What am I doing wrong?” I asked Jared.

“You just have to keep praying until God tells you,” Jared said. “And in the meantime, you have to examine your life. Are there areas you’ve been disobedient? Has God told you to do something, but you’ve defied him?”

“He hasn’t talked to me at all lately,” I said. I was embarrassed to admit that, worried it revealed my lack of faith.

Jared considered this for a moment. “Your soul is volatile right now,” he finally said in a pensive voice. I looked over at him. He was gazing toward the back of the room, eyes growing distant.

I knew this look. It always came over him when God was revealing some kind of wisdom or knowledge. 

After another moment, Jared turned to me suddenly. A change had fallen over his face. It was as if he were gone and somebody else were behind his eyes.

Jared opened his mouth slowly, then issued his command.

“God will return to you when you return to Sam.”

I said nothing.

I could think of nothing to say.

It was one of those moments in which time moves both fast and slow. I was shocked first by hearing Sam’s name aloud—hearing someone within those church walls acknowledging that he’d actually existed, since until then they’d all refused to talk about his arrest and everything leading to it—and then at the actual statement itself. How could Jared suggest such a thing? He knew what Sam had done, all the secrets and lies. He’d been present for the entire police investigation, which had happened in that very room. He knew more than he would ever tell me.

How could he suggest I go back to Sam?

How could God?

I didn’t know whether Jared was speaking as himself, or if God was speaking through Jared, or if I even still believed God spoke through people. None of that mattered, though. What mattered was this idea that my cold, dead faith could only be renewed by returning to God’s will. Which meant—if Jared could be believed—marrying a man who had preyed on me, controlled me, lied to me. Hurt me beyond reckoning, or forgiveness.

“I don’t know if that’s what God wants,” Whitney protested softly, speaking more to Jared than to me. He cut his eyes at her and she fell silent.

For a few miserable seconds, I waited for someone else to speak. 

I waited for someone to suggest a more reasonable solution to regaining my faith. Pastor Will and my friends only watched wordlessly, gauging my reaction, and I realized that this was the consensus: My faith was suffering because I hadn’t married the man God had told me to.

Suddenly I felt very far from myself. I felt I didn’t know this place, these people. I felt I’d never really known them. Just as I had never really known Sam.

I couldn’t go back to him. Not running, not walking, not crawling. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. I was too far gone now, too uncontrollable, changed on the outside and changing on the inside in ways I couldn’t explain.

I was changed enough, at least, to not even consider the option.

From All That’s Unseen: An Appalachian Memoir by Emilee Hackney, to be published on July 28, 2026 by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright (c) 2026 by Emilee Hackney.