He simply withdrew, inch by inch, and let her fill the silence he left with the assumption that she was the problem.
For six years she had believed that a good wife absorbs, accommodates, makes herself smaller to fit the shape her husband leaves for her.
She was very good at it.
She had not yet understood that being good at disappearing is not the same as being loved — that a woman can vanish completely inside a marriage and be praised, the whole time, for how little trouble she causes.
She thought often, in that last cold half-year, about the version of herself who had walked down the aisle six years earlier.
That woman had been vivid — quick to laugh, quick to argue, sure of her own opinions.
Odette could hardly remember what had happened to her, because nothing dramatic had; she had simply been sanded down, one small accommodation at a time, until the person she’d been was gone and she hadn’t noticed the moment of losing her.
She had stopped correcting Dorian at dinners because his silence afterward wasn’t worth it.
She had stopped inviting her own friends to the house because they made Maeve’s mouth tighten.
She had learned which subjects made the room go cold and had quietly stopped raising them, one by one, until the list of safe subjects was very short and the list of things she no longer said aloud was very long.