And I am going to write down, in a record no one can touch, exactly what I see — which is a frightened, exhausted, and completely sound woman who has been lied about on paper.” For the first time since I’d woken in that clinic, I cried, and they were not the tears of the fragile bride Christian needed me to be.
They were the tears of someone who had just been seen.
She examined me thoroughly, documented everything, and when I asked her the only question that mattered — whether I would one day be able to stand in a courtroom and be believed — she did not hesitate.
“Yes,” she said.
“You absolutely will.”
I have wondered many times what would have become of me without Dr.
Pratt, and the answer frightens me, because it is not that I would have been hurt.
It is that I might simply have agreed.
That is the thing about being told, gently and constantly and by everyone, that you are unwell — eventually, in the absence of anyone who says otherwise, you begin to believe it, because what else can you do, alone, against a unanimous world.
Christian had built exactly that unanimity: a fiancé, a doctor, a team, a public, all agreeing tenderly that poor Genevieve was fragile.
And against that, one honest woman with a clipboard was worth more than any amount of my own conviction, because she was outside the story he’d built, and she looked at me and said, plainly, on the record, that I was sound.
I cannot overstate what that did.
It was not that she gave me strength I didn’t have; it was that she gave me back the strength he had spent a year taking, by being the first person in a very long time to reflect my own reality back to me undistorted.
Everyone caught in this particular kind of harm needs a Dr.
Pratt — one person, outside the fog, who will say the true thing out loud.
For some people it is a doctor.
