She simply began, over years, to erode him — dropping small remarks about how my ICU hours meant I didn’t respect his work, hinting that I found his career unimpressive, that I looked down on him, that I was slipping away.

A doubt seeded here. A comparison planted there. Nothing you could point to. Just a slow, steady poison, drop by drop, until a good marriage started to feel to Julian like a thing he was failing at.

What still astonishes me, reading the folder marked Julian_Doubt_Seed, is how little she actually had to do.

She didn’t have to lie outright very often. She mostly just had to notice the ordinary friction that exists in any marriage — the missed dinner, the tired silence, the night I fell asleep before he got home — and quietly hand him a worse interpretation of it than the true one.

A wife too tired to talk became a wife who found him boring. A demanding job became a symptom of a woman who thought she was better than him.

She never planted a whole tree.