“He wanted me weak,” she said at last.
Priya nodded. “He wanted control.”
Morgan remembered the countless evenings she had come home exhausted, only to listen to Julian explain how the next opportunity would save them. She had mistaken his constant plans for ambition. Now she could see the entitlement beneath them.
There was another question Morgan had avoided asking Priya: what would she tell her mother? Her parents had died years earlier, and Clara had been the last adult who made the world feel reliably safe. Julian had understood that loneliness. In the beginning, he had filled it with Sunday pancakes and little notes tucked into her lunch bag. Morgan had loved him for noticing the quiet things. She had never expected those same quiet habits to turn into careful observations of what she owned and how she could be pressured.
At work, Morgan had always been the person who spotted a duplicate invoice or a missing receipt. She could trace a payment through six accounts and explain the discrepancy without raising her voice. At home, though, she had stopped asking for receipts because every question turned into an argument about whether she believed in her husband. She began to see that this was not a failure of intelligence. It was what happened when someone made ordinary scrutiny feel like betrayal.
