But I am a forensic accountant by training and by temperament, and in my work every digit has a place and every balance sheet eventually finds its truth.

I had begun, without quite admitting it to myself, to keep a second set of books.

Not of money.

Of this.

Of the small corrections, the gentle demands, the way a scratch became a thing to be concealed rather than a thing that had simply happened.

I was recording, and I did not yet know what the entries would add up to.

I have been asked since why I did not simply leave the first time he made my clothing his decision, and the honest answer is that it never arrives as a single decision.

It arrives as a hundred small ones, each small enough on its own to feel unreasonable to object to.

A blouse.

A collar.

A portrait.

Who leaves a man over a collar?

And that is precisely the arithmetic of it, the reason it works, the reason intelligent and careful people end up somewhere they would never have walked to in one stride.

No single entry in the ledger looks like abuse.