He had rewritten me.

He had forged a version of my own body to use as the reason for throwing it away.

I want to try to describe what that particular betrayal did to me, because it is different from the ordinary betrayals of a bad marriage, and I did not have language for it at first.

When a husband leaves you for another woman, it is a wound, but it is a clean wound, in a sense — you know what happened, and you know it was not your fault, and the world, whatever else it does, agrees with you about the facts.

What Julian did was something stranger and more disorienting.

He did not just betray me.