This is how it happens, she would tell women in her office years later.
Not with a blow.
With a thousand small subtractions, each one so minor that objecting to it would make you seem unreasonable, until one day you look in the mirror and cannot find yourself in it.
The cruelty of a man like Dorian, she came to understand, is precisely that he leaves no marks.
There was nothing she could have shown a friend, a therapist, a judge, and said: look, here is what he did to me. He had simply withdrawn his warmth and let the cold do the work, and let her believe, the whole time, that the cold was her fault — that if she were only prettier, quieter, more grateful, more useful, the furnace might come back on.
It never would have.
She understood that now.
The furnace had been redirected to another house entirely.
Chapter 3 — The Signs
Once she began to look, the signs were everywhere, and had been for months.