How she had burst into my living room with a scratch and a lie and, in the space of a few minutes, convinced my husband to try to kill me.

And watching her in that courtroom, stripped of her performance, I finally understood, and the understanding was almost more chilling than the crime.

Selina’s power had never been beauty, or cunning, exactly.

It had been performance.

She was, I realized, a person who had learned to weaponize the appearance of victimhood, to wear vulnerability as a weapon, to make herself seem so fragile and so wounded that the people around her, and especially men who wished to see themselves as protectors, would do terrible things for her, believing they were defending the defenseless.

The scratch on her arm, the tears, the trembling voice, the whispered please don’t fight over me: all of it was a performance of helplessness so practiced that it had turned my husband into a murderer while she never lifted a hand.