Loving Your Child Is an Instinct; Shielding Him From the Consequences of What He Did to Another Human Being Is Something Else Entirely — I Learned the Difference at Sixty, at the Door of a Chicken Coop

He had worked to make her doubt her own mind, to make her believe that her account of her own life was not to be trusted, even by her.

That is the deepest violence there is, deeper than any bruise: to take from a person their authority over their own reality, until they are living inside your lie about them instead of their own truth.

And when Natasha turned on that stand and said, in a voice that did not shake, I was never insane, I was only ever terrified of you — she was not just contradicting his testimony.

She was taking back the one thing he had spent eight years stealing.