All Chapters of They Called Her Unstable Then She Took Everything: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

(Marlowe)My aunt Priscilla has never once in her life asked a question she didn't already know the answer to. She did it anyway that Sunday, over the good china, in front of eleven relatives who'd clearly all been briefed before I'd even taken my coat off."Marlowe, darling." She set her fork down with the care of a woman about to say something rehearsed. "Sable mentioned you've been under a lot of strain lately. Is everything all right?"I felt every head at that table turn toward me, gently, almost imperceptibly the way a room full of people angles itself without seeming to, when everyone's agreed in advance to watch someone closely."I'm fine," I said, and heard how thin it sounded even to my own ears, worn down from a hundred identical answers to a hundred identical questions."Of course you are." Priscilla smiled, warm and terrible. "It's just Sable said you'd been having some trouble with your memory. Phone calls you don't remember making. That sort of thing.""There was a wire

(Marlowe )I decided, three days before he was due to arrive, that I wasn't going to let it happen without a fight.I don't know exactly what shifted. Maybe it was Priscilla's question at the lunch table, the way an entire room full of relatives had turned toward me like I was already a story being told about someone else. Maybe it was Edward casually knowing about a wire transfer I'd told no one about. Maybe it was simply that some old, buried part of me, the part that used to make grown men wait for her answer, had finally gotten tired of apologizing for questions I had every right to ask.Whatever it was, I found Thorne in his study that evening and told him, calmly, clearly, that I didn't want a live-in physician. That I would see someone of my own choosing if he was genuinely worried about my health, on my own terms, in an office, like any other adult woman managing her own life.He looked up from his desk with an expression of mild, indulgent surprise, the kind you'd give a chil

( Marlowe )I moved the notebook four times that night, which tells you most of what you need to know about the state I was in.First the nightstand drawer, where it had lived since I started it. Then under the loose floorboard behind the armchair, a hiding spot I'd found by accident years ago and never told a single person about. Then, in a fit of paranoia that embarrassed me even as I did it, into the lining of an old coat the same trick someone had already used on me once, with an earring I still hadn't fully made sense of. I stood in my closet at midnight with the coat in my hands and laughed, once, a short, humorless sound that didn't feel like it belonged to me, at the strange symmetry of hiding my own secrets the exact way someone else had hidden theirs.I ended up putting it back in the drawer. If a stranger was about to start living in this house, cataloguing my every mood and gesture for a file I'd never get to read, I decided I'd rather know exactly where the one honest rec

( Marlowe)I regretted it within the hour.Not the truth of it. I still believed every word I'd said to him in that garden, believed it more with each passing day, if anything. What I regretted was handing it to a stranger. A man whose salary came from my husband's checkbook, whose file on me would land, eventually, on Thorne's desk whether Kael Everhart intended it to or not. I'd spent three years learning exactly how quickly my own words could be turned into evidence against me, and I'd just handed a brand-new interrogator the single most damaging sentence I owned.So I froze him out.It wasn't difficult. I'd had years of practice arranging my face into something pleasant and unreachable, and I put every bit of that training to use the following morning at breakfast, answering his careful questions with the same flat, agreeable non-answers I gave everyone else in this house."How did you sleep?""Fine.""Any dreams you remember?""No.""Yesterday, in the garden""I don't really reme

(Marlowe )I noticed the shift before I understood it.Kael stopped following the schedule Thorne had laid out for him that first week the daily check-ins at set times, the specific questionnaire Voss had apparently designed and left behind for his successor, the quiet assumption, built into every line of that paperwork, that whatever treatment plan had already been decided simply needed a new hand to administer it. He started showing up at odd hours instead, sometimes not at all, and when he did appear, his questions had stopped sounding like a script being worked through and started sounding, unmistakably, like actual curiosity.Thorne noticed too. Of course he noticed. My husband notices everything that might threaten the careful architecture he's spent three years building, and by the second week he'd stopped pretending not to.I was in the sitting room when it finally surfaced, curled into the window seat with a book I wasn't really reading, when Thorne found Kael in the hallway