He Spent a Year Paying a Doctor to Write Down a Fragile, Unstable Version of Me That Didn’t Exist — So When He Finally Set Me Aside, the Whole World Would Believe I’d Simply Come Apart on My Own

I had to get out of it first, into a place where a real doctor could put on the record the one fact that would eventually undo him: that there was nothing wrong with me at all.

Gabriel looked at the door, and looked at me, and I watched him understand that Christian still believed, fully, that he owned this room and everyone in it.

“All right,” he said quietly.

“All right.”

Chapter 7 — The Honest Doctor

Gabriel got me out that night.

The official story, entered into my chart, was that I’d been moved to a specialized facility for rest.

In truth, a car took me to a quiet clinic in Cincinnati and a physician named Dr.