HOLYOKE, Mass. (AP) As her severely diabetic mother was being beaten yet again, a 10-year-old girl made a critical choice.
''I love you so much, but I just can't take it any more,'' she jotted in a note she left before fleeing her tenement apartment on a cold night in December 1998.
She wasn't talking only about the beatings.
Within hours, authorities began to unravel a horrific case of rape and physical abuse entangled in a bizarre religious fanaticism.
For four years, authorities say, the girls' mother, Justina Talbot, and her boyfriend, Fernand Daviau, repeatedly forced the girl and her 14-year-old half-sister to have sex with him, under the guise that it was ''God's will'' that they satisfy him.
Talbot, 38, now faces life in prison when she is sentenced Friday in Hampden Superior Court for the child rape and indecent assault of her daughters. Daviau, 43, whom Talbot met at a storefront Pentecostal church, was convicted of the same charges and is now serving a life sentence.
''She was actually taking the kids to the bedroom where the defendant was sexually molesting them,'' prosecutor Linda Pisano said. ''She was telling the children it was God's will to prepare the children for their future husbands.''
The two girls were sexually assaulted at least once a week the older girl for four years, beginning when she was 10, the younger for two years, beginning when she was 8. The younger child, who had also been sexually molested as a toddler by another of her mother's boyfriends, was told it was ''medicine'' to cure that bad memory, prosecutors said.
''It's a terrible crime,'' said Talbot's lawyer, Bonnie Allen. ''But it's a very complicated case. The mother, too, has been victimized by the actual perpetrator.''
Talbot, who maintains she wasn't aware of the rapes, suffered from battered woman's syndrome and was so worn down by her debilitating illness and the beatings from Daviau that she couldn't oppose him, Allen said.
''It was only after he was taken away to state prison that she finally admitted that he was abusing her,'' Allen said.
Daviau's lawyer did not immediately return a call for comment.
Daviau and Talbot met at church in 1990. Talbot was a single mother struggling to cope with her severe diabetes, which caused frequent blackouts. ''Before she met Fernand, the little girls were always running to the neighbors to call the ambulance after finding her blacked out on the floor,'' Allen said.
When she met Daviau, she mistook him for someone caring, she said.
''But over time he became violent and emotionally controlling,'' Allen said. ''He isolated her, curtailing her church attendance and eventually forcing her to stop attending. And when that happened she lost access to the only external support she may have found.''
In 1992, Talbot became pregnant with their first child. They had three boys together over the next four years the youngest born after their arrests.
With their mother pregnant, the girls picked up more of the work of caring for their younger siblings and cooking and cleaning.
Their days would begin at 5:30 a.m. with an hour of Bible study, then household chores, said Pisano, the prosecutor. The older girl would get the younger children dressed.
''After school, they would take the bus to Daviau's apartment to clean that,'' Pisano said. ''Then about 9 p.m. they would all return to the mother's and the girls would finish the cleaning there. They would get to bed around 11 p.m.''
Though it all, the girls managed to do well in school.
There were hints, though, that something was terribly wrong.
The younger girl told sexually suggestive stories, then later denied them when questioned by a teacher. The older girl told a teacher she had met ''a girl at the mall'' who was being sexually abused, but when the teacher took her to a counselor, she refused to give a name and later insisted ''her friend'' had gotten help.
''They were too terrified to say anything,'' Pisano said.
The older girl was excused from sex education classes at Talbot's request. She was being taught that at home, the mother said.
Nothing was reported to authorities until the December night when the 10-year-old fled.
Following his arrest, Daviau immediately blamed Talbot, according to court papers. ''I was only doing what she wanted,'' he told police as he was being fingerprinted. ''She wanted them to grow up.''
The girls, who do not have the same last name as their mother, are now living outside Massachusetts with a relative, and are doing well, the lawyers said. The three boys are in state custody.
''They are very brave, but it is a very mixed bag,'' Pisano said. ''They needed to say their piece, but they were very distraught about their Mom. They love her.''
''Somehow they got their needs met,'' said Allen. ''Probably it was from their mother while she was still a strong, single parent.