Cynthia gave me a small, confident smile, and Brandon slipped an arm around her waist, and waited.

That waiting was the entire point, and I understood it fully, because I had spent months watching him build the machine it belonged to.

For months, Brandon had been constructing a second version of me, for anyone who would listen. Charlotte’s become so emotional with the pregnancy.

Charlotte worries irrationally about money.

Charlotte doesn’t cope well with stress anymore.

Charlotte’s gotten possessive about the children.

I worry about how Charlotte might react if I ever left. Each of those sentences, on its own, sounded like the weary concern of a devoted husband.

Assembled, deliberately, over months, into a single portrait, they formed something else: a diagnosis, waiting for a symptom.

He had built the frame.

He needed only for me to step into it.

He had gathered his witnesses — his mother, his brother, his mistress, my own children — and he had set the scene, and now he waited for me to do the one thing that would complete it, which was to explode.

I understood the mechanism of it because, in a strange way, it was the same kind of pattern-work I had once done for a living, only turned to a cruel purpose.

What Brandon had built, over those months, was a trap with a single trigger, and the trigger was my own entirely reasonable pain.

Think of how perfectly it was constructed.