Page 83 of Dreamscape Therapies

"I know."

Her gaze remains on me "Were you?"

The question stings, mostly because it's so direct and I take a moment before answering.

"I don't think I was. But I also wasn't perfect."

Dany waits.

"I got frustrated. I yelled sometimes. Not at him in the way he described, but I'm not going to sit here and tell you I was some kind of saint. I was an asshole sometimes. I was tired. I was overwhelmed. I got short-tempered."

I shrug.

"I'm just a man."

Jay's eyes flick toward me, and there's something warm in them.

"But I never tried to control him," I continue. "I never told him who he could see or where he could go. I never stopped him from leaving. I never wanted him afraid of me."

Dany's expression remains unreadable as she asks her next question. "What about the accusations that you were abusive?"

My stomach twists.

"I wasn't." The answer comes quickly enough that I don't have to think about it. "I never hit him. Never threatened him. Never locked him in the house. Never took his money. Never tried to isolate him from people."

I swallow.

"But by the end, I was so used to defending myself that I couldn't even tell what was real anymore. He'd accuse me of something, and I'd spend hours trying to remember whether I'd actually done it. Sometimes I'd apologize just to make the argument stop. And then I'd feel guilty for apologizing because I knew I hadn't done anything."

The wind chimes above us sway with the breeze.

"I started keeping to myself," I admit. "Not because he told me to. Because it was easier. If I didn't go anywhere, didn't see anyone, didn't make plans, there was less chance I'd accidentally do something wrong."

Dany's brow furrows.

"That's what I mean when I say I didn't realize how bad it was until afterward. I thought I was just trying to keep the peace."

Jay finally reaches over and rests his hand on my forearm.

I glance down at it.

His thumb moves once across my skin.

"He made me feel like everything that went wrong was somehow my fault," I say. "And after hearing it enough times, I started believing him."

"Why did you stay if he was so bad?" Dany asks, studying me closely.

I let out a slow breath. "Because I loved him." The answer feels pathetic now. "I kept thinking there was a version of our relationship where things got better. That if I worked harder, listened better, gave him more attention, fixed whatever I was doing wrong, we'd get back to the way things were in the beginning."

I shake my head.

"Turns out the beginning was just the part where I hadn't figured out what I was dealing with yet. I thought I could fix him," I add. "Turns out he was perfectly capable of functioning. He just preferred making me think I was broken."

Jay's fingers tighten slightly around my arm.

Dany doesn't respond immediately.

She's still watching me, but now there's something different in her expression. Uncertainty, maybe. The kind that comes when someone has spent months believing one version of a story and suddenly finds themselves staring at another.