Ingrid’s texts had gotten shorter over those six months.

Her calls had gotten fewer.

She had seemed, on the small frozen screen, to be pulling away.

And I had done what deployed men do: I had built an explanation out of my own fear, and the explanation was another man, because that is the fear that lives closest to the surface when you are far away and cannot protect the thing you love.

I never once imagined the truth — that the texts got shorter because someone was reading them, that the calls got fewer because she was being prevented, that the pulling-away I saw on the screen was not a woman falling out of love but a woman being slowly locked in a cage where reaching for me had become dangerous.

I had the facts exactly backwards, and my fear had made me ask her, at that kitchen table, whether she was seeing someone — had made me offer suspicion to a woman who had spent six months being brutalized for staying loyal to me.