Sabrina did lie.

He genuinely did not know that a larger hand was guiding his.

A gentler woman might have let him fold all of it together into one big manipulation and call himself its final victim, and gone home lighter.

But I couldn’t, and I wouldn’t, and I have made my peace with the hardness of that.

Because the whole machine that nearly killed me ran on exactly one thing: on Nathan’s willingness to not look, to not ask, to let someone else hand him his certainty ready-made.

Renata could feed him a story, and Sabrina could act it out, but neither of them could make him refuse to hear his own wife.