I had been worked on, expertly, by people with a reason.

There is a great difference between those two things, and my whole recovery lived in the space between them.

Chapter 7 — I Stopped Defending Myself

“Please write down exactly what my daughter said,” I told Dr.

Ackerman.

“And I don’t want either of them answering questions for me anymore.”

It was a small sentence, and it took everything I had to say it, because it named out loud a thing I had let happen for a year without ever once objecting: they answered for me.

Adeline answered for me, and Nolan answered for me, and between them they had built a household in which my own voice was a formality, a thing to be spoken over and corrected and translated into what they had already decided I meant.