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Him caring if you’ve eaten enough becomes an instruction to eat food that’s healthy for you –
and that instruction to eat food that’s healthy for you becomes him deciding your meals for you and making digs if you eat anything else.
And you listen.
Over time, you begin to listen.
Your croissant at the local cafe turns from a nice snack to a niggle of doubt that you should be eating it. So you don’t.
Wearing a tiny jacket in a colour you like becomes a niggle that it doesn’t wrap you up enough and keep you warm. So you wear a different one.
And then, even more slowly. Softly, softly, softly, those pinpricks turn a bit more painful.
Disapproval becomes outright criticism, and always behind closed doors where nobody is watching – but it doesn’t matter by then, because you’re already in so deep, you believe it.
You believe it because it’s disguised as caring, and you believe it because the whole world is smiling and singing their praises of the evil prince in his beautiful mask.
You believe it when they insist that you would be a broken mess without him.
You believe it because they believe it.
Because they care.
Because they love you so much.
Because you don’t know what you’re doing.
Because you’re so ill you can’t take care of yourself.
Ungrateful.
You’re ungrateful.
You’re pitiful.
You’re so lucky, Anna. What would you do without me?
Good job I love you, isn’t it?
I love you so much, Anna.
I love you even though you wet the bed at night. So disgusting, but I love you anyway.
You’re such a beautiful person, even though your brain is so fucked you can’t remember your own name.
Nobody else would love you like I do.
Nobody else would help you change the sheets like I do.
Nobody else would tell the world how amazing you are, and how much I love you like I do.
I don’t know when Sebastian turned from the man who’d stare at me with love in his eyes, into the man who controlled every scrap of everything I ever did.
I don’t know when I became the woman who believed everything he said and tried to live up to his instructions, and his demands, and his expectations. But I did.
Slowly, over time, I did.
I stopped working late, and stopped eating what I wanted, and stopped feeling like I could go to bed past midnight, or reading under lamplight, or watching horror movies with the lights off.
I stopped feeling like I was well enough to go places where I wasn’t holding his hand.
Yet still, it was all masked in caring and people loved him for it. Everyone loved him for it.
His lovely smile, and his hand holding mine so tight. Him helping me spoon the vegetables onto my plate at the dining table. The way he’d be so worried about my seizures, and what I was and wasn’t doing to prevent them.
Everyone told me how lucky I was to have him over and over and over and over again. A mantra that lasted a decade and was still bleating strong now.
I believed them.
I believed him.
I believed everyone but that tiny little voice inside me.
Me.
I believed everyone but me.
Because I wasn’t me anymore.
I was the ill person he wanted me to believe he was saving.
I was the person he’d attack with savage little verbal blades whenever I didn’t do what he wanted.
And he was the person who needed control. Always so much control.
But when I took it back…
When he couldn’t control me anymore…
I stopped for a pause as my revelations caught up with me.
“And nobody saw any of this?” Lucas asked. “Nobody saw him saying that shit, or forcing you to dance to his bullshit tune every day of the week? They just all thought he was some kind of perfect hero parading around like Jesus in a suit?”
I shrugged. “He was always so caring. Most of the time I believed it too. It was just late at night, or sly little digs, or in anything he could twist to make me feel like I wasn’t good enough. And I did feel like I wasn’t good enough.”
“You’ll always be good enough,” he said.
The tears came then, and my breath hitched as I struggled for the words as it all came crashing in. And those tears weren’t just about the vile savagery of the rape, or the way he’d abused me so hard on that one evening. It was about all of it. So much of the decade I’d spent at his side.
It was about the tiny ways he’d gripped me so tight with his caring that I’d choked on my own fear. It was in the way he’d wrapped me up so deep in paranoia that I didn’t know my own mind.
“But I thought he loved me,” I told Lucas. “I really thought he loved me. He was always so caring and kind that I always blamed his bullshit digs on myself. Always. I mean, I never even thought about it. He’d be vile after a few drinks sometimes, but even then it was always wrapped in a pretty bow of concern. Wanting the best for me. Seeing the worst in me. Wanting to change that.”
