I was not afraid, exactly.

I had moved past fear into something colder and more useful.

But I understood, finally, the full shape of the timeline.

The wedding was not the end of his plan.

It was the door, and Lisbon was the room, and I was not going to let him walk me through it.

I have wondered, since, whether he would actually have harmed me in Lisbon, or whether the plan was only ever to complete the paperwork there, to get my signatures notarized in a jurisdiction where I had no lawyer and no language and no train receipts to prove where I had been, and then to bring home a quiet wife whose assets were now his and whose capacity to object had been drowned, like his sister’s, in distance and in his own careful account of events.

I do not know which it was, and I have made my peace with not knowing, because the honest truth is that it does not matter.