A lone tear slid from her lashes and disappeared beneath her jawline. Her lips formed a thin line. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything for certain anymore.”
“You can talk to me. I’m your friend.”
Her eyes remained closed. He assumed she wouldn’t answer, but there seemed some sort of internal struggle happening beneath the surface, as if she wanted to explain but physically couldn’t. So, help him, God, if that man laid a hand on her…
“Did he hit you?”
She shook her head. “Sometimes I wished he would. At least then, I’d know I wasn’t imagining things. I’d know I wasn’t crazy.”
“Was he verbally abusive to you?”
Her lips trembled as her frown deepened. “Not always. But when he was, he did it so precisely, it could happen in front of a room full of people and no one would realize it was happening, including me.”
He always hated Lance, and he wasn’t sure he could handle disliking him any more than he already did, but sure enough, it was happening. “Can you give me an example?”
She sniffled and exhaled softly, her eyes still resting closed as the tension slipped from her face. “He was charming. Every woman I knew envied the way he treated me. He was the guy who held doors, pulled out chairs, and showed up with a long stem rose for no reason at all.”
Maybe he didn’t want to hear this after all.
“Lance loved being the center of attention. It never bothered me, because I always felt privileged to simply hang in his orbit. I mean, who am I? I’m no one.”
He wanted to shake her. She was not no one. She was the showstopper, the person people actually came to see. Lance was a piece of shit everyone tolerated simply to be near her.
“There’s an old saying,” she continued. “Some people cut the heads off others to make themselves feel taller. I didn’t realize Lance was cutting off my head, because he did it so subtly over such a long period of time, but eventually, I woke up and couldn’t think for myself anymore. It was as if he’d performed a lobotomy by scraping away thin layers, just paper thin slivers, year after year. I truly feel like he stole a part of my thinking and it scares me, because I can’t find it. If that doesn’t sound crazy I don’t know what does.”
She looked the same, still indefinably beautiful, but also looked weak, like she’d been the victim of something awful. “How would he do it?”
“First, it wasn’t directed at me. I’d catch him in little exaggerations. If his car cost seventy thousand, he’d tell people it was worth a hundred. I never corrected him, because it would have embarrassed both of us. Then those exaggerations shifted into bigger lies, like when his co-worker got a promotion, he told our friends he got one.”
“Did you ever question him about it?” He knew Lance liked to brag, it was the biggest reason why people avoided him.
“A few times, but he had a way of twisting things around. And when I questioned him, he somehow turned the focus on my flaws, saying I was flighty or accusing me of misremembering things. He’d lie so often and so convincingly about the littlest things, I’d get lost in the minutia and be unable to trace my way back to the truth.” She shrugged. “Maybe I was remembering things wrong. The more he repeated a lie, the more I figured it must be true. It was as if he so genuinely believed himself, I was the one misunderstanding. I’m not as confident as him.”
But she had been at one time. “He was gaslighting you, Julie.”
She finally opened her eyes but didn’t look at him. Her focus remained on the shadows across the room, like she were staring into another time and place. “I think that’s what it was. I’ve read a few books, and he fits all the criteria, the lies, the repetition, and the escalation. Once, I really challenged him, and he doubled down on the lie so many times, screaming at me with such fury, I figured I had to be wrong. Nothing could make me that angry with him. I figured…such conviction could only come from a loyalty to the truth.”
“But you knew he was lying.”
She paused and looked at him then. “No, Pat. I didn’t know anything anymore. I just knew I didn’t want to fight and I was sorry I brought it up. After a while, we lived in an alternate reality, where he got to rewrite the facts any way it suited him.”
“Didn’t others see what he was doing?”
“If they did, they ignored it. I know you never cared for Lance, but he’s really quite popular in Maryland. We have a lot of friends, and he’s very charismatic. People love his energy and want to be close to him. It’s like a drug. His one friend, Tim, would agree with anything he said. It’s pathetic. One time…”