But a few months of a man being cared for by a woman who asks nothing has a way of becoming the natural order of things, and Gethin’s family, who had never liked me, found the arrangement enormously convenient.
They began, gently at first, to describe me as the little wife at home.
They did it at dinners I skipped because I was changing his dressings.
They did it to their friends, to Gethin, eventually to me, until the story hardened into fact: Nerys doesn’t really work; Nerys lives off Gethin; Nerys is fortunate he married her.
And I let it harden, because I was tired, and because correcting it would have required a fight I didn’t have the strength for on top of the nursing, and because some quiet part of me had started to wonder if the story was true.
That is the thing about being made small.