It was the imprint that saved me.

One ordinary morning I tipped the pills into my palm to take one, and the light from the window caught the tiny stamp pressed into the side of the tablet, and something in the back of my mind — the part that hadn’t been fogged over yet — snagged on it.

I knew that imprint.

Years earlier, reviewing a pharmaceutical company we were considering acquiring, I had spent weeks buried in drug monographs, and I had a memory for detail that even six months of fog hadn’t fully drowned.

The stamp on that blue pill did not belong to any mild anti-anxiety medication.

It belonged to a heavy sedative — the kind prescribed rarely and carefully, the kind whose documented effects are lethargy, memory disruption, and exactly the kind of clouded, unreliable confusion I had been drowning in for half a year.

I stood in my bathroom holding a handful of the thing that had been done to me, and the fog did not lift gently.

It burned off all at once, the way ground fog vanishes when the sun finally clears the ridge, and what it left behind was cold and very clear.

Chapter 4 — What I Did Not Do

I did not confront him.

That was the first decision, and it was the one that saved everything that came after, and it went against every screaming instinct I had.

Because standing there with the evidence in my hand, what I wanted was to walk downstairs and throw the pills in his face.

And I understood — with the first clear thought I’d had in months — that a confrontation was precisely what would destroy me.

For six months Sennett had been building a story: that I was unstable, unreliable, coming apart.