And then it got close, and she found out she couldn’t, and instead of saying so, she started quietly rearranging the terms.

That is a much more ordinary kind of monstrousness than a plot, and I think it is far more common, and I think there are men and women doing it in houses all over this country tonight without ever having planned a single thing.

Part Four: What I Did Not See

The therapist we eventually went to made me do an exercise I resented enormously at the time.

She asked me to write down, in order, every single thing from the previous eighteen months that I had explained away.

I did it because I do assignments.