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

He had not needed to hurt me in any way the world could see.

He had needed something quieter and, in its way, worse: he had needed me diminished, sidelined, recast as fragile — a woman too unwell to marry, too delicate to question, too medicated by her own stress to be believed if she ever did.

And he had begun, three days earlier, by checking me into this very clinic, so that there would be a record.

Chapter 3 — Kept, Not Loved