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

But she had looked away from it being built, because looking would have cost her the life she’d been promised.

Months later she sent me a letter — not asking forgiveness, only saying she was sorry, that she had been too afraid of him for too long.

I did not forgive her.

But I stopped hating her, because I finally saw that she and I had both been managed by the same man, and that the center of the whole tragedy had never been her at all.

It had always been Christian, and his certainty that other people’s lives were his to arrange.