People have wondered, hearing that, whether it was cruelty, that request, whether wanting to capture the moment of my husband’s downfall was a kind of vindictiveness beneath me.

And I have thought about it honestly, and I do not believe it was.

It was something else, something that only a person who has been on the receiving end of a certain kind of manipulation fully understands.

For years, Julian had rewritten reality on me.

It was his most practiced skill: he could look at a thing that had plainly happened and, with total confidence, insist it had happened differently, until I began to doubt my own memory, my own perceptions, my own mind.

He gaslit me, in the clinical sense, for years, and his entire plan in Thailand had been the ultimate expression of it: to construct a false reality, the abandoned child, the runaway mother, and to make the world, and perhaps eventually even me, believe it.