A loosening of the screws that held the mirror over my side of the bed in place – the antique one that had been given to me by my mother. He’d been so convincing, helping to bandage up my head, looking up places on Yelp that could replace cracked glass. I found the screwdriver two days later, sitting between pairs of socks, out of place, almost like he wanted me to discover it.

And then, waking up in the middle of the night. An intense shooting pain in my arm, Davis beside me, breathing deeply, sleeping, or so I thought. A bruise appearing, pale purple, the next morning. His face, blank, when I’d asked him if he knew how I’d gotten it. It’s your bruise, he’d said, laughing. Not mine.

Davis’s cruelty was never random, was never something that just exploded. He swore far less than the average New Yorker – and never at me. And in our years together, he raised his voice only a handful of times. Instead, his anger simmered until he found a way to channel it. He was proud of his control. He looked down on those who didn’t have it, people like me.

When I tried to leave last May, after the fourth time I’d woken with bruises on my body, I wasn’t stupid. I knew by then how much he watched me. I changed my Apple password, and I disconnected that damn Nest camera. I didn’t use my credit card, either. Still, I underestimated how tied together we’d become. At the only dog-friendly hotel I’d found in Brooklyn, where I’d been holed up for two days, I’d found a card advertising the hotel’s app – Download to get free high-speed internet, it had promised. Apparently, Davis had set us up as a family in Apple, which meant that even with my new password, our app downloads were synched and shared.

When I went down to the lobby for Dusty’s afternoon walk, which I always did right at three, he and Ellie were waiting for me, the sun streaking through the windows, a beautiful late-spring day. He came up to me and hugged me tight, asked me how my ‘solo staycation’ had been, told me he’d brought Ellie along for a surprise brunch at a nearby dog-friendly restaurant. I’d been too in shock to argue, to explain to him – and her – that I’d been considering leaving for good. Maybe a part of me wanted to buy his story, wanted it to be okay for us. His punishments were all so strange, so hard to pinpoint, that sometimes I told myself they’d never even happened. And waking up to bruises – could I even be totally sure they were from him? What if I’d started sleepwalking and didn’t know it? What if? What if?