Camilla never attacked openly.
She wept.
She worried aloud.
She would show Corbin a message from his mother and murmur about how “hurtful” it was, how “controlling,” until a son who had loved his mother his whole life began, slowly, to see every call from her as an intrusion and every concern as an attack.
Isolation, Marguerite had learned too late, is rarely a single locked door.
It is a hundred small persuasions, each one reasonable on its own, that together wall a person off from everyone who might tell him the truth.
“By the end,” Marguerite said, “he’d changed the codes on his office.
He told security not to let me past the lobby.
My own son.” She pressed the envelope flatter against herself.
“And the worst part is that I let her make me look exactly like the woman she said I was — hurt, and angry, and always turning up where I wasn’t wanted.
She built the cage, and then she pointed at me standing in it.”
Adrienne listened, and though the two of them could not have lived more different lives, she recognized the shape of what Marguerite was describing.
She had watched it happen on a smaller scale, in cheaper apartments — the way a certain kind of person separates you from everyone who loves you, not with a fence but with a story, whispered patiently over months, until you look up one day and find that all the people who might have warned you have somehow become the enemy.
It is the oldest trick there is, and it works because it never feels like a trick from the inside.