That is one of the cruelest mechanisms of the whole thing, and Gavin had operated it expertly: by the time my mother most needed to reach for help, he had already spent months making sure there was almost no one left for her to reach.

The friends had been driven off one by one.

The family visits had been made too difficult to be worth it.

Even her own daughter she had learned to greet with a careful, edited cheerfulness, because complaining about her husband felt disloyal and dangerous both.

He had built the isolation because an isolated person is a controllable person, and a person with no one to tell is a person who cannot be rescued.

What he failed to account for was that the one connection he never managed to sever, the one he underestimated because he underestimated me, was the one that would end him.