“It devastated me,” I said. Ellis put his pen down.

“I knew what he was doing,” I said. “I want that in the record too, because it’s true. I understood within about a minute that he was performing for his mother, and part of me was relieved, because it meant he had a plan and I hadn’t had a plan in five months.

“And it devastated me anyway. Because by then I weighed a hundred and one pounds and I had no hair and I’d been told every day for five months that I was a liar and a burden and that I looked disgusting, and when your husband says the same sentence in the same house in the same voice, it doesn’t matter what you know. It goes in the same place all the rest of it went. I lay in that room that night and I thought, so it’s true, then. Everyone agrees. Even him.

“I was still thinking that four days later in the hospital when they told me I was malnourished. I think about it now. I checked my hair in the toaster this morning.”

Kesler’s pen had stopped.

“I’m telling you this because you’re going to use it,” I said. “That’s your job. But I’d like the record to show what you’re actually asking about.”