One afternoon Gabriel handed me a stack of paper: the deleted texts between Christian and Dr.
Lawson, recovered.
We need the record to show she’s not well in advance of the wedding, one read. Make the diagnosis stick — she’s started asking why she’s so tired. And Lawson’s reply: Already documented.
On paper she’s been fragile for months.
No one will question the fiancé who wants to protect her. And then, two days before I was checked into that clinic, the instruction that finished it: Get her admitted for “exhaustion.” Keep her rested and quiet.
Make it look like her own fragility, not our doing, and we control the story from there. I read them twice, and then I set them down, because my hands would not hold them steady.
This was the thing Christian had done that I found hardest to forgive — harder, even, than Sabrina, harder than the wedding.
He had taken my own mind and my own body and turned them into evidence against me.
He had made me doubt myself for a year, made me wonder if I was breaking, and the whole time he had been the one carefully writing the story of my breaking, so that when he finally set me aside, the world — and very nearly I myself — would believe I had simply come apart on my own.
There is no bruise for that.
But it is a kind of violence, and Attorney Cardenas told me the law had names for it: fraud, coercion, conspiracy, the falsifying of medical records.
Names I intended to see him answer to.
