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

It was what he did with a telephone.

Over years, patiently, he had gone through her life and cut every line that connected her to another human being who might have helped her: the friends who stopped being allowed to visit, the workers who were fired, the mother in Omaha whose calls he answered and whose letters he burned, all of it methodical, all of it aimed at the same thing.

Because an abuser’s true project is not injury.

It is isolation.