It was almost impressive, in a sickening way, how fast Percival reached for the oldest tool in the abuser’s kit even as his entire world collapsed around him. You were hysterical.

It’s manipulated.

I’d never hurt you. Faced with the photograph of a handprint he had left on my own skin, his instinct was not to deny the act — the act was on the screen, on my wrist, undeniable — but to deny my perception of it, to make me, in front of three hundred people, the unreliable narrator of my own experience. You were hysterical. It is the same move, exactly, as she’s had emotional problems for years — the reflexive reach to relocate the madness from the abuser to the victim, to make the person who was harmed the one whose grip on reality is in question.

He had used it on Yvaine for years, and it had worked, because she had been alone and afraid and had no one to confirm that what happened to her was real.

It did not work on me, and the reason it did not work is the entire moral of the thing: I was not alone.

I had Yvaine’s evidence, and Fitzroy’s audit, and a photograph, and a room full of witnesses, and, walking through the doors at that very moment, the woman herself.