Natalie’s therapist had suggested better boundaries.
I asked her one day when she had started seeing a therapist.
“Oh,” she said, folding towels at my kitchen table, “Adrian thought it might help with the anxiety.”
“Did you think it would help?”
She hesitated.
That answer was enough.
By the second year of the marriage, Adrian had inserted himself between Natalie and nearly everyone who made her feel most like herself.
Her college roommate was “draining.”
Her former business partner was “jealous.”
My questions were “judgmental.”
Once, I found Natalie standing in my pantry staring at a shelf and not seeing it.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Nothing.”
“Don’t do that.”
She laughed, but it sounded broken. “He says I’m forgetting entire conversations now.”
“And are you?”
She looked at me then, truly looked, and there was fear in her eyes so naked I felt it like a hand around my throat.
“I don’t know,” she whispered.
That was the first time I understood Adrian wasn’t just controlling her schedule or eroding her confidence.
He was trying to colonize her reality.
I told her then, “When someone keeps insisting your memory cannot be trusted, that is not care. That is conquest.”