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

It is participation with the lights off.

Sabrina had chosen it about my fate because knowing what Christian planned would have meant either stopping him or being complicit, and she could not bear the first and would not admit the second, so she simply declined to ask.

And I have had to be honest that I did a gentler version of the same thing for years — the face-down phone I never picked up, the trips I never questioned, the tiredness I explained away rather than investigated.

I, too, had been afraid of the answer.