She took one calming breath, another, and another. “This is the important part,” she said, and she saw him open his mouth to protest and close it. Good. She needed this part to be clear and scientific. Unemotional. “I thought at first it was the money that mattered the most to him, and if I left him in control of it, he’d let me go. And I was right, for the first week or two. But he found out people were talking about why I had left him. And he started planting all those vile articles.…”

She shook her head. “After a few months of that, I met with a lawyer to find out if divorce was an option. Alain found out, and he came to my apartment. I was giving a party,” she said. “Just a small one, for some of my new friends. They were mostly artists and … well, I suppose charming drunks pretending to be artists. But they didn’t care about the rumors. I suppose everyone had their secrets and scandals there, so mine weren’t as important. They were kind.”

She’d been so proud to welcome them to her little flat, a sixth the size of any house she’d ever lived in but filled with her own choices. The furniture she’d cobbled together from the used markets, the deep emerald wallpaper that was so much bolder than Alain ever would have tolerated.

“I didn’t want a scene, so I pulled him into a separate room. We argued, quietly. I didn’t want them to hear. I told him to leave. I told him I knew who had given the papers those stories. That there was nothing more he could do to me. And he pushed me against the wall and choked me until I lost consciousness.”

Her fingers scrabbling against his coat. Those buttons with their whimsical dragons, the buttons of a lighthearted man without a care in the world. The sound of her friends’ happy chatter in the next room, knowing they couldn’t hear her, knowing she’d die three yards from help.

“The last thing I remember is him saying it could get a lot worse and I should try him and see what he could do.”

She stopped, staring down at the shine on the dining room table. There. It was out. She felt … nothing. Empty.

“The man in your vision, he said he’d warned you, that he’d told you not to try him,” Sam said quietly. “And he choked you, against the tree.”

“And his hair was golden, like Alain’s. It wasn’t Alain. But if someone were to tailor-make a nightmare for me, it wouldn’t be so far off.”

Sam swallowed. “That’s it,” he said, a fleet of emotions—rage, tenderness, sorrow—crossing his face as he spoke. “You’ve cracked it.”