George counted on that.

Manipulators always do.

They count on the fact that their victims would rather doubt their own perceptions than confront the terrible truth those perceptions point to, and so the manipulator can operate almost in the open, behind a defense made not of secrecy but of the victim’s own desperate desire not to know.

I saw the flicker.

I chose the desire not to know.

And my daughter paid, for a while, the price of my choosing.