"It was like he was just going through the motions." Still, she rationalized his behavior away, telling herself he was just a typical self-centered guy. "He didn't really seem able to empathize," she says. The tragedy left her consumed with grief - and concerned about her footing with Mark.
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Michelle had just begun a graduate program at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology when her father died of lung cancer. The first few months of marriage, however, were less than rosy. (Image credit: Courtesy of Michelle Kramer) It was like the fairy tales my parents had read me as a child." In November 2001, she hopped into a horse-drawn carriage and married Mark at the Chicago Botanic Garden. "I looked into that ring and saw my whole future reflected," Michelle recalls. Romantic trips to Greece and Italy followed a wedding proposal on bended knee came within the year, at a historic piazza in Rome. I'm my father's daughter." So she started studying for the GREs. While Mark was thrilled with this arrangement, Michelle soon began to feel unfulfilled. A favorite activity: dressing up for him as a sexy librarian. At his urging, she quit her job, entertaining herself each day by preparing for Mark's arrival home from work. She moved in to Mark's place quickly, she says. She jokes with the bartender about a local delicacy she discovered at a street market - chocolate-covered waffles on a stick - then continues the tale of her Hollywood romance. Michelle sits at a fireside bar in the lobby of her Baltimore apartment building, a former tin factory converted into trendy waterfront dwellings. Michelle began to picture their own future together. Mark had been married once before, he told Michelle, but the union was short-lived, as he believed his wife had been unfaithful. He wanted to open his own clinic one day, instead of working at a group surgery center. His family had run a popular packaged-food business in New York for years Mark had inherited his father's business drive. "He said, 'I meet a lot of pretty girls who are pretty vapid. "He liked that we had nerdy scientific books in common," she says. The couple also discussed serious topics: medicine and philosophy, as well as psychology, which she had studied in college. On that trip, the two "laughed the whole flight, till people thought we were crazy," Michelle says. Mark, 36 at the time, invited Michelle to dinner, and then to Miami for a weekend. That wasn't something that happened in my neighborhood.
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She had been wowed by doctors ever since she was 13, when she nearly lost a leg after a drunk driver plowed into her. Michelle remembers Mark looking "very New York" in his black satin shirt that night at the club, back in 2000. "He got up at 4 a.m., had coffee and a powdered doughnut, went to work." "He worked hard - he wanted to achieve the American dream," Michelle says. She'd grown up on Chicago's south side, a blue-collar neighborhood where her Irish-German-American father worked three jobs: as a pipe fitter, snow blower, and repairman. Michelle, then 25, was working as a counselor at a hospital, living with her parents. She and Mark were at a club in Chicago, she says, both with friends.
She steps into a quiet pub, orders a steak sandwich, and recalls the night she first met her husband. Wearing a fitted camel coat and skinny brown pants, she looks like a buttoned-up Brooks Brothers model, but with a go-go-girl edge. On a recent Saturday afternoon, Michelle Kramer, now 36, tiptoes in her stilettos along the cobblestone streets of a harborside neighborhood in Baltimore, her blonde hair blowing in the breeze. With her 30th birthday on the horizon, this trip to Greece was supposed to be a celebration. Anyway, she had her own problems to deal with: She'd recently suffered a miscarriage, five months into her pregnancy, and she was still recuperating. People were always suing doctors, she thought - especially surgeons who flaunted their wealth, as Mark liked to do. He was a successful surgeon specializing in sinuses he ran his own clinic in the town of Merrillville, Indiana, not far from Chicago. She also didn't believe the malpractice claims against her husband.
Michelle didn't take the question seriously it was just a fantasy, she thought. Then he asked if she could sever all ties to her friends and family. One day, he randomly asked Michelle if she would be willing to move to Europe from Chicago and live a simpler life. Mark had been acting strangely of late, due to stress over several malpractice suits.
Mark had probably just gone for a jog, she told herself, trying to shake a chilling feeling that this could be something more serious. The next morning, Michelle woke up at 6 a.m., alone.
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