And then it got close, and she found out she couldn’t, and instead of saying so, she started quietly rearranging the terms.
That is a much more ordinary kind of monstrousness than a plot, and I think it is far more common, and I think there are men and women doing it in houses all over this country tonight without ever having planned a single thing.
Part Four: What I Did Not See
The therapist we eventually went to made me do an exercise I resented enormously at the time.
She asked me to write down, in order, every single thing from the previous eighteen months that I had explained away.
I did it because I do assignments.
It took two evenings and it ran to two pages, and the second page is the one that put me on the floor of my own kitchen.
October, fourteen months out. Hannah stopped coming into the kitchen when Pamela was in it.
I noticed this.
I decided it was because Hannah was nine and nine-year-olds are in their rooms.
November. A photograph disappeared from the refrigerator — Rebecca on a beach in Oregon, holding a two-year-old Hannah upside down by the ankles, both of them screaming with laughter.
It was Hannah’s favorite.
