I could have spotted this pattern in a stranger’s marriage across a crowded room.

But it is nearly impossible to see the architecture when you are living inside the building, when the man laying the trap is the man you kiss goodnight, when every wall goes up so slowly and so lovingly that you mistake the narrowing for intimacy.

By the time I understood I was in a cage, I had helped build most of it myself, brick by reasonable brick, thanking him the whole time for his concern.

That is what makes it so effective, and so hard to prove, and so lonely.