It was a threat to define something — to define me, publicly, as unwell and bitter and unreliable, and to make that definition stick.
And I realized, standing there shaking, that this was the only weapon he had ever truly had over me: not force, not money, but the power to author the story of who I was.
For five years I had let him hold that pen, had accepted his version of me as the real one, had believed I was safe only inside the identity he wrote for me.
And a threat to control the story only works on a person who has agreed that the story-teller gets to decide the truth.
The moment I stopped agreeing — the moment I understood that the facts were the facts whether or not Christian’s machine could spin them — his threat lost its teeth.
He could say I was unstable.
He could not make me unstable, and more importantly, he could not make the evidence unstable: the file, the texts, the transfers, the recording, Dr.
Pratt’s honest evaluation.
Those things did not care how skillfully he framed them.
That is the great vulnerability of a man whose only weapon is the narrative: he is helpless against anything that is simply, verifiably true.
So I stopped trying to win the story, which was his home ground, and I went instead to the ground where he could not follow, the ground of documented fact, and I built my case there, brick by verifiable brick, until no amount of his authorship could bring it down
