The drugging was never random cruelty.
It was evidence manufacturing.
Every night they stole from me was a night Julian could later describe to a judge — she was confused, she disappeared for hours, she hurt herself, she couldn’t account for her time.
“Don’t leave marks” wasn’t mercy.
It was a man making sure the bruises looked like the symptoms of decline instead of the fingerprints of a crime.
They weren’t trying to hurt me in the way I’d first feared in that bathroom.
They were trying, far more coldly, to erase me — to turn a healthy, competent woman into a legal ghost, declared incapable, while they spent her father’s money and called it caretaking.
And they were weeks away from filing.
Chapter 4: The Fifth Ride
Here is the thing about people who are certain you’re helpless.
They stop watching you carefully.
So I let them keep their story a little longer.
