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 never once suspected that the undoing was being administered to me, that the fog had an author, that the growing sense of my own fragility was a thing being carefully installed.

That is the deepest cruelty in the whole business, deeper than the secret family, deeper than the wedding.

Christian did not only lie to the world about me.

He arranged for me to lie to myself about myself — to become my own accuser, to carry his invention of my instability around inside my own head as if it were the truth.

And when I found that file, when I saw the fictional Genevieve laid out on official letterhead, something clicked back into place with an almost physical relief, because it meant I was not, after all, coming apart.