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

“Yes,” she said.

“You absolutely will.”

I have wondered many times what would have become of me without Dr.

Pratt, and the answer frightens me, because it is not that I would have been hurt.

It is that I might simply have agreed.

That is the thing about being told, gently and constantly and by everyone, that you are unwell — eventually, in the absence of anyone who says otherwise, you begin to believe it, because what else can you do, alone, against a unanimous world.

Christian had built exactly that unanimity: a fiancé, a doctor, a team, a public, all agreeing tenderly that poor Genevieve was fragile.